LAST week Jean Anglade sent the final manuscript of the latest novel Le Grand Dérangement (The Big Disturbance) to his publisher. Though a remarkable occasion, as this will be the100th book authored by him, it is only secondary to another historical event: next Wednesday, on the 18th of March, Anglade will be celebrating his 100th birthday.

Born in a central France village in the Auvergne region that is lavishly surrounded by wooded hills, valleys and streams, Anglade always tells stories of people living and things happening in his earthy paradise.

In the mid 1950s, somewhat vexed with the writer’s obsession with the countryside and his indifference to the existentialist movement, the Latin Quarter intellectuals in Paris had contemptuously qualified him as ‘the man with a green pen’, thus barring him out of their exclusive circle.

But that did not bother Anglade; his passion for living and writing in Auvergne remained unhampered. He never tried to move out of his town despite tempting offers from Paris and refused to write about anything else but his enchanted surroundings.

“I love existing,” he was often heard saying, “but I am simply not interested in being an existentialist.”

“My birth was an accident,” he once told an interviewer, “and as a child I had enjoyed exactly twelve days of happiness. This was when my father, a soldier during the First World War, returned home on short leave. He went back to the front of Sommes along the German border and was killed in September 1916.”

Growing up and being raised in extreme poverty by his widowed mother, the young Anglade soon impressed his teachers with his ability to learn lessons quickly and his talent for writing eloquently, not only in French but also in Italian and Spanish.

His secret dream of writing fiction headed towards its destined rendezvous soon enough when, at age 21, Anglade was conscripted for military service. He was sent to be trained at the Aulnat airbase in south-west France where the surprise of his lifetime awaited him. There, his instructor was nobody else than Antoine de St Exupéry, the legendary pilot and later the writer of The Little Prince and many other works. (For more on St Exupéry refer to Letter from Paris / Aug 3, 2014).

Conversations with St Exupéry kindled in the youthful Anglade the will to write. On return from military service he was offered the job of schoolteacher in Clermont-Ferrand, not far from his birthplace. By now he had caught the bug of writing and would soon begin his first novel The Dog of the Lord which would not be published until 1952, at the relatively late age of thirty-seven.

The book was an immediate success. Henri Pourrat, a respected literary critic of the period, wrote to him: “I picked up your work and couldn’t put it down before it was finished. You are a novelist.”

Despite continued successful publications, Anglade never stopped being a schoolteacher until his retirement in 1980. Strangely enough, at the beginning the translations of his novels were more popular in foreign countries like Italy, Germany and Ireland than in France where they were available in the original version.

His energy and the speed with which he works astonish everyone. He has continued living in the same country house where he has turned his garage into an office and a library and has kept on writing and publishing books, often twice a year, for the past more than sixty years. He has written novels of course, but also biographies, essays, poetry and plays. Three years ago, at age 97, he actively participated in a television documentary dedicated to his career.

An interesting detail: Anglade has used the same typewriter all these years to create his one hundred books.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris. ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn March 15th , 2015

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