Free The High-Life by Jean-Pierre Martinet Page A

spluttering monster of a book, the roughly 400 pages of Jerome follow the almost absurdly nightmarish trajectory of two murderous days in the life of Jerome Bauche, a childlike yet possibly brilliant ogre engaged in a demented obsession with a schoolgirl and an insistent effort to annihilate his own humanity. Jerome's namesake, Hieronymous Bosch, offers a visual backdrop for the novel, with his surreal and allegorical vision of hell mapped over Martinet's unsettling vision of Paris. With Jerome , Martinet took the antihero to new levels, injecting into it everything he could find and borrow from his masters: the dark lyricism of Louis-Ferdinand Celine; the sardonic slapstick of Samuel Beckett; the tortured, grotesque psychology of Dostoyevsky; and the pop experimentalism and uglier possibilities of Jim Thompson's crime novels. Like one of the Marquis de Sade's unending narratives, the result is a recalcitrant afterbirth of such grotesque magnitude that even its detractors have had to contend with it as something more of a creature than a novel.
    Once again, his novel was received with almost hostile silence and sank like a stone, selling only a little better than La Somnolence . Looking over his royalty statements that year and noting the number of copies sold of each of the novels, Martinet wrote his lifelong friend, the critic, editor, and publisher Alfred Eibel: "Well, from 474 to 628 is making a bit of progress." Jerome , his best-selling book in his lifetime, would never manage to break 800 copies in sales.
    That same year, realizing that his dream of directing a film was never to be, and fed up with the industry in any case, Martinet left his job in Paris, moved back to Libourne to live with his mother (as well as his older sister Monique, who was to spend her life in and out of a psychiatric hospital), and there awaited a small inheritance. With it, he opened a bookstore of sorts in Tours, a news kiosk where he sold notebooks, papers, sports magazines, and little else to an indifferent clientele. His efforts to stock literary reviews, or the classic crime fiction of Goodis, Chandler, Hammett, and Thompson, proved to be fruitless and led to no sales whatsoever. He had stopped writing. "One horrible detail," he wrote Eibel: "I'm not writing and I don't miss it."
    Like his novels, the store failed to take: after a few seasons, he sold it and at the age of forty again moved back to Libourne to live with his mother—a scenario not dissimilar, as some have pointed out, to that of his fictionalized live-at-home Jerome. He eventually began to write again: a fragment of what was to be a much longer work was published as Ceux qui n'en menent paslarge (With their hearts in their boots), a grimly humorous account of a bleak night on the town undertaken by two ferocious losers, the garrulous movie assistant Dagonard and the permanently down-on-his-luck actor Georges Maman, who has just discovered he is unable to get it up even for a last-ditch role in a porn film. It is not for nothing that Martinet placed his unfinished novel under an epigraph that borrows the opening line of David Goodis's Retreat from Oblivion : "After a while it gets so bad that you want to stop the whole business." The would-be novel's own opening sentence has a touch more humor: "Maman looked at the sky, but he could tell that no one up there was looking at him." After spending a year trying to develop the novel, Martinet gave it up in disgust.
    Martinet's last novel, L'Ombre des forets (The shadow of the forests), appeared less than a year later, again through the efforts of Eibel and others who believed in his work. Once again it received no attention and sold only a few hundred copies. The hopes Martinet had placed in this final effort were swiftly crushed. "I'm stopping," he very simply told Eibel; and indeed, he published nothing more in the six years he had left.
    The always-present role of alcohol in Martinet's life proceeded to grow more predominant.