Tony Duvert Tribute

The writer Tony Duvert, 63, was discovered dead on Wednesday, August 20,
at home, in the small village of Thoré-la-Rochelle (Loir-et-Cher). He
had been dead for about a month. An investigation has been started, but
he appears to have died of natural causes. Tony Duvert had not published
any books since 1989. He had been almost forgotten, and yet, he left a
mark on his time—the 1970s—by the extreme freedom that he demonstrated
in both his writings and his life, by his unique tone of coarseness and
grace, by the rhythm of his sentence, often without punctuation, carried
along by only the movement of desire—capable, as people believed then,
of changing the world.

Born in 1945, Tony Duvert was an outlaw, he felt himself banned—the
title of one of his first books, published in 1969 by Minuit, which will
remain his publisher. But the music, at once rough and refined, of his
prose lent all the nocturnal strolls and excursions of a man who loved
men the look of a funereal odyssey, of an almost mythical promenade by
the sheer strangeness and solitude of the darkest city neighborhoods.

In /Le Voyageur/ [The Traveler] (1970), with a feeling of free fall and
absence to himself, Tony Duvert lets old images encircle him. In the
countryside drowned by winter and rain, the ghosts of Karim (killed by
his mother), Daniel (the adolescent whom the narrator teaches to write),
André, Pierre, and Patrick, deprived, lost, went searching in the fog
for a gentleness and a justice that the world denies them.

It is perhaps in order to welcome them that Tony Duvert wrote this
/Paysage de fantaisie/ [Landscape of Fantasy], awarded the Prix Médicis
in 1973 [published by Grove in 1976 as /Strange Landscape/]. In a
whorehouse-orphanage, the boarders embrace all the whims of the moment,
without taboo, look, or reproach. In this book there is a kind of amoral
jubilation and ferocious joy. And, in the jostling of grammar, gestures,
and scenes, in the transport of the unique sentence, a challenge to
every literary and ethical convention. In his almost childlike joy, this
was how Duvert forgot that he was an adult, perhaps even that he was a
writer.

But it is in /Journal d’un innocent/ [Journal of an Innocent] (1976)
that this pagan innocence is expressed most clearly. In a universe
without either fault or suffering, somewhere in the South, embraces
follow one another with a total, absolute naturalness. There is only
skin and sun, the simple worship of desire: and one could say that Tony
Duvert breaks free from the very need for eroticism, from the
obligations of pornography—this pornography that he has been so readily
accused of in order to mask it with a sulfurous cloud and make one
forget that he was a great writer celebrating the flesh. Two works—/Le
Bon Sex illustré/ [Good Sex Illustrated] (1974) and /L’Enfant au
masculin/ [The Child in the Masculine] (1980)—attempted to give a more
thought-out form to his vision of the world and of love.

Tony Duvert had a genuine fervor: for nature, central especially to
/Quand mourut Jonathan/ [When Jonathan Died] (1978), which recalls the
love of a man and a child. This relationship takes on the appearance and
the rhythm of a biological association, as if, by dint of understanding
and harmony, they both had become plants mutually emitting harmful
poisons to each other until they were destroyed and separated by
society. This society, Tony Duvert seemed to get closer to it the better
to denigrate it in /L’Île Atlantique/ [The Atlantic Island] (1979), his
most classical, almost naturalist, novel. It is a kind of comedy à la
Marcel Aymé that Gérard Mordillat adapted for television in 2005.
Afterwards, Tony Duvert stopped writing novels. /Un anneau d’argent à
l’oreille /[A Silver Ring in the Ear] (1982) is only a distant
reflection, the echo of a farewell to this literary form.

In 1989, he still published an /Abécédaire malveillant/ [A Spiteful
Primer], a series of aphorisms that express all the things he
detests—priests, philosophers, parents. But one felt that he had lost
the joy of provocation. As if he had understood that the times were
increasingly hostile to him, that he could no longer open up landscapes
of fantasy with his sentence alone, with his almost barbarous music. He
isolated himself in this small Loir-et-Clair village, very alone,
deprived, renouncing even the use of words, and sometimes only hearing
in the distance the laughing of his pagan angels.