Roger Vailland

Roger Vailland (born in Acy-en-Multien, Oise, 1907; died in Meillonnas, Ain, 1965) was a French novelist, essayist and screenwriter whose work, written in French, draws on his career as a journalist, his political commitments and a sharp interest in power and pleasure. His life spans the surrealist circles of the interwar years, the Resistance against the Nazi occupation and a later break with communism, which makes him a revealing witness to twentieth-century France.

The son of a surveyor, he grew up moving between Oise, Paris and Reims, a city being rebuilt after the First World War. As a young man he joined friends in a group that sought to disturb the senses through drugs and alcohol, and he helped launch the experimental magazine Le Grand Jeu, close to surrealism. In 1928 he became a reporter for Paris-Midi, an evening edition of Paris-Soir, and moved in Paris literary circles that included Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris and Louis Aragon. He travelled widely as a correspondent and produced serialised fiction in the early 1930s.

During the occupation he withdrew to Lyon and later to a farmhouse near Bourg-en-Bresse, from where he joined the Resistance. That experience led to Drôle de jeu (1945), a novel about a network of fighters that won the Prix Interallié and is regarded as one of the finest books about the anti-fascist Resistance. After the war he joined the French Communist Party, but he left in 1956 after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising. His postwar novels, such as Bon pied, bon œil and Beau masque, examine militancy, workers' solidarity and the limits of individual advancement. La Loi (1957) earned him the Prix Goncourt.

He also wrote screenplays with Roger Vadim and others, and essays on Laclos and libertinage. His style pairs journalistic exactness with irony and a steady concern for personal freedom in the face of doctrine. He spent his last years with Élisabeth Naldi in Meillonnas, where he died of lung cancer in 1965. His legacy rests mainly on Drôle de jeu and La Loi, and on a body of work still read as a reflection on politics, morality and desire.