INTERVIEW:A chance encounter in a pet cemetery led Philippe Grimbert to reopen his family's history and write a book that blurs the lines between fact and fiction, writes Max McGuinness.
THERE IS SOMETHING paradoxical about a novel titled Secretthat has been read by more than one million people. French psychoanalyst Philippe Grimbert, who will appear at the Franco-Irish Literary Festival in Dublin Castle later this month, never expected his second novel to be quite so successful. But the fact that "the most secret part of my story has become the most public" does not trouble him. "I like paradoxes; they are a source of intellectual satisfaction for me."
For though it is presented as a novel, Secretis the true story of a fatal failure to deceive. After the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, Grimbert's Jewish father managed to flee from Paris to the Loire valley. His first wife and son, Grimbert's half-brother, were due to follow. But as they waited to cross the border into the relative safety of the Vichy-controlled south, they were stopped by Germans.
Rather than present her specially procured false papers, Hannah handed over her real ones, inscribed with the inevitable yellow star. She and her son Simon were deported to Auschwitz, where they were gassed on arrival. Simple carelessness or suicidal spite? Grimbert became convinced that it could only be the latter, after a family friend revealed to him at the age of 15 that his childhood imaginary brother had been uncannily real.
By the outbreak of war, his obsessively athletic father had already fallen in love with his similarly statuesque sister-in-law, who later became Grimbert's mother. Hannah's self-betrayal was thus an unconscious expression of her frustration and desire for revenge; Grimbert insists that though he effectively invented this episode, "the psychoanalyst in me says it could not have been otherwise".
In the absence of hard facts about precisely what happened, Grimbert felt compelled to resort to the techniques of the novel as the only means available to him to tell their story. "Novelising the story allowed me to discover the truth . . . though I have more and more difficulty separating truth from falsehood."
Learning about his family's hidden, tragic past propelled Grimbert to study psychoanalysis, which he characterises as a means of "revealing the most secret part of ourselves - our desires".
He has always had what he calls "a taste for secrecy", which he ascribes in part to the influence of the codified discourse of the Jewish Talmud. As a child, he was absorbed by the intrigue and suspense of Enid Blyton; today, he likes to psychoanalyse topics, such as the secrets of the success of popular songs and the unconscious roots of the desire to smoke.
But his work with autistic children has underlined that secrets are essential to psychological stability. Autistic people suffer, he says, from absolute freedom. Like psychotics, they are often incapable of lying - "they have such an open unconscious" says Grimbert, "that they have no secrets at all". He is dismissive of the claims of neuroscientists, notwithstanding their undoubted contribution to medical progress, that they can isolate the area of the brain responsible for autism.
The unconscious similarly resists complete scientific explanation. The error of behavioural psychology is, he says, "to confound the function with the organism". The goings-on of the brain will never suffice to explain all our mental experiences.
He regrets that our society only seems to have time for approaches to mental health which can deliver "efficiency, rapidity, and evaluation". Psychoanalysis inherently resists such quantification and is thus mistrusted by many scientists. But the complexity, confusion, and diversity characterising psychological trauma defy ready explanation or treatment. Grimbert's own paradoxical story is a case in point.
Secretis suffused with the terrible irony of a secret which derived from a moment of catastrophic betrayal, when his father's wife revealed her Jewish identity. The novel is a metaphor for the Holocaust as a whole - a campaign of extermination conducted in secrecy, which has since become perhaps the most widely researched event in history.
"The operation was conducted in secrecy," he writes pithily of the first round-up of Parisian Jews - a secrecy which consumed his parents for the rest of their lives.
His family's tragic past formed a major part of the extensive psychoanalysis he underwent as part of his own training. But the feeling that he had to write it down arrived later.
Wandering near his home in the French countryside, he encountered a pet cemetery where the headstones of two dogs inflamed a personal and historical wound. The headstones were inscribed with the name of their owner - Josée de Chambrun, loyal daughter and "Ambassadrice de charme" to Pierre Laval, the deeply sinister prime minister in Marshal Pétain's puppet Vichy government, who eagerly organised the round-up of French Jews.
Grimbert, who had to repeat his baccalauréat because he found it impossible to discuss Laval during his oral exam, suddenly realised that this anti-Semite's mutts had been commemorated while his father's wife and son had not.
Apart from maintaining the secrecy over their fate, Grimbert's father had taken further steps to conceal his past. Originally called "Grinberg", he altered this, like many Jews, to the more French-sounding "Grimbert" after the second World War. His name was thus, Grimberg writes in Secret, "cleansed of those two deadly letters". The author is typically attuned to the rich, unconscious symbolism, pointing out that the letter "n", or "haine", French for hatred, has been replaced by "m", or "aime", love; "t", or "tais" - shut up, took the place of "g", or "j'ai" - I have.
Secret by Philippe Grimbert (Portobello Books, £7.99) is out now.
Entente Cordiale
The ninth Franco-Irish Literary Festival, organised by the Alliance Française Dublin and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy, will be held from Friday, April 18th to Sunday, April 20th, at Dublin Castle and Alliance Française, Kildare Street Dublin 2. Log on to www.francoirishliteraryfestival.com