Joseph Delteil: The Passion of Joan of Arc During one month in 1927 Joseph Delteil collaborated with Carl Dreyer in the preparation of a screenplay for The Passion of Joan of Arc. The two artists were of different aesthetic and personal temperaments. Delteil, a slight wiry man with a huge moustache. a vivid hybrid of eccentric surrealist poet and French Midi peasant, remembers Dreyer as “froid et positif, un peu lent.” They researched many possibilities and directions together. Delteil contributed ideas and images with enthusiasm and “a I'envi” to the collaboration. Dreyer chose the material from it that he wanted and went his separate way.’ After the collaboration Delteil published his continuity. La Passion de Jeanne d’ Arc.? a free-standing poetic and literary experiment in writing for film and Dreyer. for all intents and purposes, drafted his own screenplay Dreyer used Delteil, but sparingly and prudently. The beautiful empathetic seriousness of Dreyer's film is the antithesis of Delteil’s creative temper- ament and poetic manner. Joseph Delteil was born® 20 April 1894 in Villar-en-Val, a village in the department of Aude. He received a classical clerical education at the College Stanislas in Carcassonne and served in the French auxiliary during the First World War. He published poetry in the early twenties and after a surprising success with two surreal prose novels in 1923, Sur /e Fleuve Amour and Choléra, he left a bank job in the Midi and emigrated to avant-garde Paris. Sur Je Fleuve Amour chronicled the barbarous and amorous adventures of Ludmilla, a Delteil ideal of sensuality and apolitics. and those of her two boyfriends, Russian bolshevik innocents hilariously adrift in revolution, Siberia and Shanghai, who travel with her. The novel is a flickering burlesque, half Chagall half Fu Manchu. Choléra, which may be Delteil’s most aesthetically satisfactory work, is a little like a surreal Gene Kelly film. Four innocents are " Letter to the author from Joseph Delteil. 20 May 1973 ? Paris: Trémois, 1927 3 Biographical material on Delteil throughout the article is taken primarily from: Joseph Delteil, La Delteillerie (Paris: B. Grasset, 1968), Joseph Delteil: Essays in Tribute (Aylesford. Kent: St. Albert's Press. 1962). André LeBois, Joseph Delteil, L'Homme et L’Oeuvre (Blainville-sur-Mer [Manche]: L’Amitié par le Livre, 1961). Sur fe Fleuve Amour and Choléra are included in Joseph Deltei|, Oeuvres Complates (Paris; B Grasset. 1961). Sur le Fleuve Amour is in English as On the River Ameur. trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Covici. Friede. 1929). 292abroad and travelling in it. A guy recollects the adventures and demises of his three girlfriends. Louis Aragon brought Delteil to the attention of André Breton, who admitted him temporarily to the surrealists’ automatic writing soirées. In 1925 Delteil won the Prix Femina for Jeanne d‘Arc.* a pop biography of France’s then recently canonized (1920) national heroine. Published initially in a limited edition, it become enormously popular and was in its twenty-ninth printing at the time Malcolm Cowley was writing the introduction to his English translation of it in 1926.° The book was then perhaps headed for fifty- nine or sixty editions in France. The Jeanne d’Arc ended Delteil’s formal association with the surrealists. André Breton characterized it as a “saloperie.” and cashiered him for it and other ideological and personal disloyalties in a public letter in La Révolution Surr€aliste. Delteil's Jeanne d'Arc is a cheeky satirical epic, and in parts romantic, mannerist, and baroque to the nth power. Sensational images and jokes snake through it. There are ongoing wars in it between reveries and wisecracks. The jokes restore proportion to a text that rhythmically achieves plateau after plateau of sublimity and outrage. The mischief and hilarity they strew in their wake is sometimes innocent and sometimes malicious. Cowley’s translation begins “at a gallop.” Chic, evocative images ("An oil lamp was burning like a soul.”) decorate a rapid succession of vignettes of medieval French country life. A drowsy farmyard scene is the prelude to a Delteil dive into “Baby's dream” where the infant Joan is fighting an epic battle on a field of milk with a huge zig-zagging beast who is eating the sun. Odes and hymns to all manner of commodities and subjects ensue: to Milk, to the first tooth, to the Forest with a capital F, to Joan in the abstract ("It is here that Joan of Arc delights me to the point of apostrophe,” Delteil delightedly exclaims in this vein later in the story.) — to Delteil, whose egoism is omni- present and irrepressible. The jokes and images go off like firecrackers, singly and in clusters, sometimes half a dozen on a single page. A variant of the Hail Mary is cheekily hymned: "Good evening Lady’Mary . . . The Lord is your lover!” Joan leads an innocent and barbarous battle between rival children’s gangs 4 la Tom Sawyer. a battle that Delteil garnishes with World War | im- ages (“munitions caissons.” “bombardment”) and the meter of the /liad. Joan's saints are “chums from heaven’ and one chews mirabelles. The relief of the siege of Orléans is a feast of wisecracks, neat images (“They carried Joan's great banner by armfuls.”), and medieval and Rabelaisian details in profusion. Delteil’s Joan is a supportive, surreal ideal of ferocity, adolescent sensuality, and publicity Midway in the tale Delteil describes a medieval cavalry battle in raw and heavy images, half miniature painting half Picabia. The French ride in images of lethargy and armor across the plain of La Beauce ('‘An army of sleep and iron dragged heavily through the eternal grain.”), past brushed blocks of landscape and mood under the June sun, through a “cinema of wheat” hunting for the English soldiers hidden in the grain. The charge @ la Agincourt is a murderous * Paris: B. Grasset. 1925. Also in Qeuvres Completes. 5 Joseph Delteil. Joan of Arc. trans. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Minton, Balch & Company. 1926). Cowley’s introduction is a source for most of the material in this paragraph. Breton’s letter is his response to a provocative public note from Delteil. Both letters are in “Correspondence.” La Révolution Surréaliste. No. 4, Premi&re année, 15 July 1925, p. 32. The summary and random quotations that follow are from Cowley’s translation 293orgy that releases the army and Joan from tedium and torpor. After the cor- onation of the king, Joan strides off on a variety of bizarre and affectionate bypaths. One is the literal road home designated by the sign. "DOMREMY, 80 miles.” Another is personal combat with Delteil’s invention, an English Joan named “Miss Malcolm.” Stirrings of adolescent sensuality have myste- riously troubled the heroine from the outset of her mission and become more insistent than ever. Hilarious burlesques of French prudishness recur peri- odically throughout the novel Funny and jarring as much of it is, Delteil’s book is more than an alarming comic strip. Several Delteil tendencies take a quieter and sometimes lovely form in this passage She stared at this bit of nature she foved so well, these fields whose sub stance she felt in her flesh, this air which from all eternity had been conceived for her bosom. this sky which was only the enlargement of her eyes. Of all this free and strong space. of all this matter and all this life. she felt herself the Centre and the Reason. She was completely wélded to the universe, by @ sort of intimate and general adherence. The cattle grazing ima field called her by name. and a little virgin cloud beckoned her like a sister, An immemor- ial attraction rose from all this yawning immensity. To melt, to melt oneself In eternal things! Everything before her eyes was smile. attraction. aspiration. Everything was inviting her. hailing her. commanding and convoking her Truly, there was nothing which separated her from this sunny domain which was her element: to which she was destined as the part is destined for the whole Nothing separated her from the world. from the lovely 1mmensity nothing but a gesture. a vague movement. hardly astep There she was standing. her heart full of the infinite, her eyes drunk with space, her arms outstretched toward the vast Earth of sorcery and fascination she was there and suddenly a bundle of womanhood fell into space rolled through the intoxication of evening against the side of the donjon..in a spiral, a little formless thing subject to the laws which govern falling bodies © He describes the winter landscape of the Somme with the precision of a detail in a medieval miniature painting, and with a pantheistic edge that is both traditionally Catholic and surreal They crossed the Somme by boat. The weather was calm, cold and clear. The clouds were sheathed in ice The trees. inverted, having buried their branches in the earth. plunged their roots into the sky. The sun was red. like a tuby set in the ring of the skies. Everything had stopped, stood motionless; everything save this mysterious Somme, this ‘one thing in nature which con- tinued to live and flow, scaly and changeable. like a great fish.” In the Jeanne d’ Are the trial and recantation are sketched in somewhat hastily. Nature reveries, quips. “in” scholastic jokes, and liberal dashes of medieval politics and conventional caricature are patched into an expressionistic continuum. For perhaps the only time in the novel, Delteil leaves well enough alone: he assembles an Anthology of Joan’s answers from the trial and lets them stand. His final chapter is a surprising and horrendous feat. Joan's burning is at once infernal, hilarious. and affecting. He transfers the chapter in its entirety to the film continuity To my knowledge David Bordwell’s only significant error in his Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne d” Arc is his brief characterization of Delteil’s continuity as “labored and sentimental."® The continuity is not the broadly and intel- © Delteil. Cowley trans.. pp. 217-18 7 (bid... p. 225. 8 Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, 1973, p. 75. 294