In July 1973, after having completed my doctoral thesis on the Irish Constitutions of 1922 and 1937 and published my award-winning Histoire de l’Irlande, I decided to write Michel Déon a letter and to express my admiration for his work by sending him a copy of my book.
Déon, then 54, had left the Greek island of Spetsai to settle in Tynagh, Co Galway, where he was to live until his death in 2016. He was the author of Les Poneys sauvages, which is considered one of the most important French contemporary novels. At the same time as the beginning of our correspondence, he published Un taxi mauve (A Purple Taxi), which received the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française and was brilliantly made into a film starring Peter Ustinov, Charlotte Rampling, Fred Astaire and Philippe Noiret. The success of both novel and film introduced the French public to the glories of Connemara, which in turn attracted thousands of visitors and established Michel Déon as the best intercessor between France and Ireland.
Twenty-four years younger than Déon, I was about to be appointed Honorary Consul for Ireland in the South-East of France by Dr Garret FitzGerald, then minister for foreign affairs in the government of Liam Cosgrave. I could hardly have guessed that I would fulfil this task for no fewer than 50 years. At the time, I was also the co-editor of Études Irlandaises, a reputed French scholarly journal of Irish studies and the future author of more than 10 books on Ireland.
An inveterate letter writer, Michel Déon sent me a prompt and appreciative reply in July 1973. One letter led to another, and before long we were writing back and forth at a prodigious rate as the present volume of more than 400 letters significantly demonstrates. We met two years later and would regularly meet up in Tynagh, Paris, Antibes, my hometown in the south of France, and, after 1989, in Clonbur, Co Galway, where my wife and I had bought a holiday house overlooking Lough Corrib and Lough Mask.
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Our mutual love of Ireland, “our Ireland” as Déon would take great care to specify, meaning the west and the Wild Atlantic Way more than Dublin and the east coast, led to a great many common endeavours. The Hermit of Tynagh, as I used to call him jokingly, helped me to publish my biography in French of Michael Collins and wrote a preface to this evocation of the life and times of the Big Fellow, a book which is still in print, I am happy to say.
When he was elected a member of the Académie française in 1978, Déon asked me to represent Ireland on the committee constituted to raise the finance and offer him his ceremonial sword. In September 1980, I persuaded him to join the Jameson Irish Club, whose membership included Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, David Niven, Louis and Ann Le Brocquy and many other hibernophiles.
A decade later, I launched The Ireland Fund of France which I chaired for nearly 20 years. Michel Déon was the guest of honour of one of our fundraising gala dinners. A grant of The Ireland Fund of France was given to the Alliance Française of Dublin to help finance the performance in Ireland of Ariane ou l’Oubli, a play by Michel. On the theme of “Ireland, the last Myth of Europe”, I interviewed him in the Princess Grace Irish Library, which had been inaugurated in the Principality of Monaco three years earlier in homage to the late Princess Grace’s profound connection to the land of her ancestors.
In 1989, we launched together, in Antibes, a Mediterranean literary prize named after the poet and playwright Jacques Audiberti. The first Prix Jacques Audiberti was awarded to Lawrence Durrell, the famous author of The Alexandria Quartet, who claimed some Irish blood, however remote, in his Anglo-Indian lineage. Déon, who chaired the jury of this literary prize for many years, was also happy to honour Patrick Leigh Fermor, who also claimed to have a few drops of Irish blood.
Towards the end of his life, I was glad to be able to facilitate the publication by Lilliput Press of the translation of his last book on Ireland, Horseman, Pass By! This reflective memoir evoked Michel Déon’s life and experiences in the west of Ireland, describing the colourful and varied personalities that he had encountered down through the years. This book was at once a lament for an Ireland that had all but disappeared and a hymn of praise for his beloved Old Rectory in Tynagh, “a precious haven where we could find peace and independence of spirit”. Michel was able to hold in his hands this moving tribute to his adopted country five days before he passed away at the Galway Clinic on December 28th, 2016.
Just published in France, the exchange of letters between the two of us spanning more than 40 years is a fascinating reflection on the Irish political events of the time, the literary scene in France, family plans, the Prix Audiberti of Antibes, some chance encounters, outstanding memories and various declarations of mutual interest. Above all, it bears witness to a friendship which withstood the tests of distance and age with remarkable fortitude, and which only death put an end to.
These letters are often exuberant, coarse and amusing. They chronicle the developing literary and personal fortunes of two cosmopolitan characters in love with the Emerald Isle, one of whom is undoubtedly hailed as being among the greatest contemporary French novelists, recognised as such by the Michel Déon prize for nonfiction literature awarded biennially in Dublin by the Royal Irish Academy with the support of the Department of Foreign Affairs, in conjunction with a similar prize awarded in Paris to a work of fiction by the Académie française every two years.
Michel was a dear friend to me and to his beloved country of adoption and I dare to hope that our correspondence will be of some interest to many people.
Pierre Joannon, a member of the Royal Irish Academy, has just published Correspondance 1973-2016 (Éditions la Thébaïde), which brings together all the letters between him and his longstanding friend, Michel Déon.
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