Hill

  JEAN GIONO (1895–1970) was born and lived most of his life in the town of Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Largely self-educated, he started working as a bank clerk at the age of sixteen and reported for military service when World War I broke out. He fought in the battle of Verdun and was one of the few members of his company to survive. After the war, he returned to his job and family in Manosque and became a vocal, lifelong pacifist. After the success of Hill, which won the Prix Brentano, he left the bank and began to publish prolifically. During World War II Giono’s outspoken pacifism led some to accuse him unjustly of collaboration with the Nazis; after France’s liberation in 1944, he was imprisoned and held without charges. Despite being blacklisted after his release, Giono continued writing and was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1954.

  PAUL EPRILE is a longtime publisher (Between the Lines, Toronto), as well as a poet and translator. He is currently at work on the translation of Jean Giono’s novel Melville (forthcoming from NYRB) and lives on the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario, Canada.

  DAVID ABRAM is the director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. A cultural ecologist, philosopher, and performance artist, he is the award-winning author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. He teaches and lectures around the world and lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.

  HILL

  JEAN GIONO

  Translated from the French by

  PAUL EPRILE

  Introduction by

  DAVID ABRAM

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1929 by Bernard Grasset, Paris

  Translation copyright © 2016 by Paul Eprile

  Introduction copyright © 2016 by David Abram

  All rights reserved.

  Frontispiece by Claude Boutterin.

  First published in French by Bernard Grasset as Colline.

  Cover image: Debbie Honickman, Les Bastides Blanches, © 2013; courtesy of the artist

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Giono, Jean, 1895–1970, author. | Eprile, Paul, translator.

  Title: Hill / by Jean Giono ; translated by Paul Eprile ; introduction by David Abram.

  Other titles: Colline. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2016. | Series: New York Review Books Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015038888 (print) | LCCN 2015046511 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590179185 (paperback) | ISBN 9781590179192 (epub)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology. | FICTION / Psychological.

  Classification: LCC PQ2613.I57 C613 2016 (print) | LCC PQ2613.I57 (ebook) | DDC 843/.912—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038888

  ISBN 978-1-59017-919-2

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  Dedication

  HILL

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  All of man’s mistakes arise because he imagines that he walks upon a lifeless thing, whereas his footsteps imprint themselves in a flesh full of vital power.

  —JEAN GIONO

  THIS TRANSLATION of Jean Giono’s Colline goes to press during a time of rapidly intensifying ecological disarray. More and more species find themselves plunged into extinction by the steady surge of human progress, while seasonal cycles go haywire and the planet itself shivers into a bone-wrenching fever. Many people find themselves bereft, astonished by the callousness of their own species and by the strange inability of modern civilization to correct its dire course. For those who recognize the animate earth as the source of all sustenance, a future once anticipated with excitement now looms as an inchoate shadow stirring only a vague dread. The disquiet that troubles their sleep stems less from a clear premonition than from the lack of clear images, from the difficulty of glimpsing any way toward a livable world from the place where we are now, at the end—it would seem—of a particular dream of progress.

  Where are the fresh ideas, the new forms of perception, the new modes of association that might open us toward a viable future? Yet perhaps the quest for new ideas and new insights—the steady yearning for the new—holds us within the same dream of progress that’s brought the whole of the biosphere to this uncanny impasse. Instead of always looking off toward the future, perhaps we should strive to become more deeply awake to the full depth of the present moment that surrounds us, opening our eyes and ears to notice the countless other-than-human shapes of sentience that were obscured by the sense-deadening assumptions undergirding the modern era: assumptions regarding the inertness of matter and the mechanical character of material reality, its amenability to being analyzed and figured out by a human mind, or intellect, that floats somehow apart from and above that reality, able to dissociate itself from the body and the bodily earth.

  Further, a clear assessment of the current impasse, and the possibilities hidden within it, may best be served by a keen awareness of the many forms of human life that were shouldered aside by the march of progress—ways of life we thought were left behind but that still linger (and even flourish) in pockets on the edge of this surging civilization.

  The characters in Hill inhabit just such a time out of time. High in the foothills of the French Alps, in the shadow of Mount Lure, the inhabitants of a tiny hamlet eke out a tenuous living from a land dense with forests of pine and oak and juniper, thick with rock outcroppings and brambles and the scent of wildflowers (clematis, wormwood, honeysuckle) but also a few small orchards and olive groves, carefully tended. When, in what era? Well, sometime after the invention of the steam-powered threshers working the farms on the plain far below, and the advent of the distant railroad, and yet a long while before the arrival of the automobile: The journey up from the plain takes a full three hours by horse and cart.

  These peasants raise a few goats for cheese, and the menfolk hunt whatever they can that’s good to eat. Gondran and his wife, Marguerite, Jaume with his drooping mustache and his daughter, Ulalie, the simpleton Gagou and the garrulous but inscrutable elder, Janet—if one said that these were the main characters in the novel, one would not be entirely wrong. But neither would one really be right. For in this work, as in the other early novels of Jean Giono, the primary actors are the elemental powers of the more-than-human earth that enable and necessarily influence all the human happenings. The wind gliding up from the valley and spilling down from the mountain passes is itself a character, as are the flocks of birds who ride the wind’s moods, carving their way through its calms and its turbulence, and the forest with its trees heaving and flexing as underground roots feel their way toward fresh moisture. Up above, needles and leaves slowly bask and imbibe the sun’s radiance. The shining sun, too, has its exuberant life: “In a single leap the sun clears the crest of the horizon. It enters the sky like a wrestler, atop its undulating arms of fire.”

  Shaping the tale as well are the creatures who slither and hum and bound within these wooded hills: the wild boar nuzzling among the stones for tubers, swarming insects, snakes coiled in the shade, a feral cat, lizards, hares—all the many sentient lives whose earnest engagements sometimes intersect our human activities at oblique angles (intersections that often go unnoticed
, yet now and then catalyze unexpected changes in the habits of a person or the equilibrium of a community). The waters, too, are alive, not just the streams that sometimes swell with fresh rain but also those subterranean flows coursing through interstices in the geological strata, bubbling out of the ground as fresh springs or gushing up through an iron pipe into a carefully crafted fountain. For built things, as well, have their agency—are they not fashioned, after all, from materials birthed by the breathing earth? These whitewashed houses, for example, whose stone walls impart a sense of safety to those who dwell within them—don’t these buildings have their own moods and expressions?

  Young Maurras half opens the door of his stable. He looks at the houses one after the other. They’re still sleeping, soundlessly, like tired-out animals. Gondran’s place alone is making a soft, rattling sound, behind its hedge. . . . The house has its eyes open—big, watery eyes, which Marguerite’s plump shadow passes across like a rolling pupil. The doorway drools a stream of dishwater.

  Yet beneath the parched soils, underneath all these many lives, stirs the voluminous life of the hill itself—the brooding body that sustains, supports, and perhaps feels all that happens upon its surface. And this hill is but a fold in the broad flesh of Mount Lure, the implacable power spreading its shadowed wings, every evening, over this tiny cluster of houses.

  •

  Jean Giono was born in 1895, in the rural town of Manosque, a thousand-year-old settlement in the valley of the Durance River, set among the rolling hills, plateaus, and mountains of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. His mother was a laundress, his father a shoemaker of fiercely independent political and social views. Growing up among the smells of hot irons and steam and freshly washed linen, listening to the sounds of the cobbler’s craft making necessary things from simple materials, young Jean gained an early appreciation for the sensuous and palpable textures of life. The sensations gleaned when roaming outside the town walls—watching peasants working the hillside fields, hearing the speech of the scythe and smelling the new-mown wheat, accompanying shepherds as they drive their flocks to the summer pastures high in the mountains (learning the rhythmic and singsong cries by which the herders guide the flocks and signal their sheepdogs)—all such visceral impressions of life lived in direct relation to the seasons settled deep into the young man’s memory.

  At sixteen he quits school and begins working as a clerk in the local bank to help support his family. He reads Homer in the off-hours. When war breaks out Jean is called up to serve in the infantry, which he does for five years. Posted to the north, he fights in the hellish battle of Verdun—the longest battle of the war. As the armies begin to deploy chemical warfare, his eyelids are scorched by mustard gas in the fighting. He is one of only two members of his company to survive.

  The gruesome horror of war, the anguish of watching so many comrades die, scarred Giono’s soul. The sheer insanity of it, the inconceivable waste of life by the newly mechanized forms of warfare, each side racing to overcome the other with more effective killing machines—machine guns, armored tanks, tanks with rotating turrets, flamethrowers, poison gas, fighter airplanes, bombers—transformed Giono into an ardent pacifist, with a distaste verging on disgust for so-called “progress.” He made his way back home, past forests now leveled to stumps, past long-cultivated fields turned to muck and farm animals starved and dying. In Manosque, with most of his generation dead or wounded, he took up again his job at the bank, married, started a family, and soon began to write, exploring with words the possibility of other ways of living, other ways of feeling and thinking that might draw humankind in a different direction, that might induce a swerve in our collective trajectory, away from the growing mechanization of life and the inevitability of further war. He began to write of the earth—of a living relation to the elemental, earthly cosmos as the necessary source of all human solidarity, as the inescapable (but easily overlooked) ground of all affection between persons and between cultures, as the very possibility of peace.

  •

  Hill was Giono’s first published novel (he ultimately published more than fifty books, the great majority of which were works of fiction), and in this work we find him grappling with and giving a first shape to themes that would remain central to all his early novels, and in some manner to all his life’s work. Giono’s vision is intensely—even overwhelmingly—ecological. I say “overwhelmingly” because this vision is glimpsed by the human protagonists in Hill only in moments of epiphany, when it threatens to swamp all their settled assumptions regarding the workings of the world. In part this indirection is due to Giono’s greatness as a novelist: He will never spell everything out for his readers but will afford us only partial and fragmentary glimpses of a mystery that resists any total understanding. Yet it’s also a result of Giono’s own exploratory moves toward a stance that remains somewhat embryonic in this first work but will gradually emerge as a full-blown animate cosmology (though again, never spelled out: a cosmos that can only be sensed from one’s limited position within its depths) in Song of the World, published five years later. In that work, the human figures are fully a part of the wild and darkly breathing cosmos (indeed, the two human protagonists seem to be walking expressions of the river and the forest, respectively), while in Hill the human characters are negotiating their first, dawning awareness of their inherence within a world that is, itself, alive . . . and the prospect terrifies them.

  Although the coarse and spiteful elder, Janet, carries something of this cosmological vision as a secret within his now-paralyzed body, it’s his son-in-law, Gondran, who first stumbles upon this strange new angle of sight while hoeing in his olive grove. He’s feeling strong; it’s a fine day, and when his spade startles a lizard that darts out from under the grass, Gondran can’t resist the sudden intoxication of power: He slashes the reptile with his spade and watches its severed limbs writhe in the dirt. But then, upon noticing the creature’s blood, an unease quietly comes over him, stopping up his throat like a stone. “While he digs, it occurs to him for the first time that there’s a kind of blood rising inside bark, just like his own blood; that a fierce will to live makes the tree branches twist and propels these sprays of grasses into the sky.”

  Sensing for the first time the life stirring all around him in plants, in animals, he begins to wonder at the suffering that he unleashes when he scythes or when he cuts down a tree. The epiphany grows: Perhaps even the stones are alive, and the rocky ground where he stands. “This earth! . . . what if she really is a living being, what if she really is one body?”

  The vision swells, intensifies, transforms everything around him: “An immense life force, slow to move, but awesome in its naked power, rouses the stupendous body of earth, flows over her valleys and knolls, folds her flatlands, bends her rivers, and builds up her thick coat of soil and vegetation.”

  Yet Gondran, the simple peasant, cannot contain this vision; what it straightaway stirs in him is fear, terror. What if this living earth has bad intentions? What if its massive body is readying itself to destroy him, the way he slashed that lizard? “In no time, to avenge herself, she’ll haul me up to where the skylarks lose their breath.”

  He rushes back to the houses to warn the others. Over a bottle of absinthe (a recipe perfected by old Janet) the other men ponder the ramifications, taking care not to alarm the women. The most reflective of them, Jaume, only amplifies Gondran’s concern, spreading his paranoia to the others. They arm themselves; they become watchful, on the lookout for . . . what? They do not know. Only that something in this broad terrain may be out to get them for the way they’ve been treating the land. Perhaps the hill itself.

  •

  It might be worth pointing out that the author did not title his novel La Colline (The Hill) but rather Colline (Hill). Given that nouns, in French, are pretty much always preceded by a definite or indefinite article, the fact that here Hill stands on its own seems significant. Indeed atop Giono’s manuscript, he had written “La Colli
ne,” but then had crossed out the definite article. Perhaps the reason lies here: When we use a definite or indefinite article in front of any noun—a bear, the bear—it entails a slight distance from that being, either for classification (as one bear among many) or specification (the bear, there). But when we dispense with an article and speak of this presence as Bear, there is no distance. The object involves us totally. “The Hill” determines a particular hill that we may approach or envision from a distance. Hill names a power that absorbs us, and may even, perhaps, subsume us.

  •

  Giono spoke of this work, and the two novels that shortly followed it—Un de Baumugnes in 1929 (published in English as Lovers Are Never Losers) and Regain in 1930 (published in English as Second Harvest)—as his Pan trilogy, although the three stories are not connected. Nor is the god Pan overtly mentioned in any of them. Yet in these first novels the author hoped to invoke the rich energies associated with this deity, and to impart something of that wild magic to those who read the work. Half human in visage, but with the horns and hindquarters of a goat, Pan is the god of untamed places, of woodlands and meadows and reedy swamps, the spirit of deep forests and high rocky slopes that only mountain goats can navigate. An ally of all things wild, the horned god is the hair-raising power that moves in the depths of nature; he’s the lilt in rustic music and the sexual abandon of springtime—the spontaneity and robust exuberance of renewal. For some, Pan is but one of several names of a horned personification of the wild that was honored in many parts of pre-Christian Europe but was later demonized by the church, transformed into the cloven-hooved and horned image of the Devil.

  As is evident from the eight or nine novels that followed Hill, Giono was preparing to invoke the vitalizing aspect of Pan in his writings, the creative and regenerative exuberance that the god can instill in those who’ve learned to align themselves with the cycles of wild nature. But with this first novel he wanted to present the more unsettling and dangerous quality of this power, that which can unnerve persons who stumble inadvertently into wild terrain, inducing a headlong fear that’s come to be called “panic” since it’s provoked by Pan’s proximity.