Raymond Radiguet (French: [ʁɛmɔ̃ ʁadiɡɛ]; 18 June 1903 – 12 December 1923) was a French novelist and poet. His two novels are notable for their psychological complexity and classical aesthetics, as well as for their controversial subject matter. Radiguet died unexpectedly at the age of twenty after contracting typhoid fever.
Radiguet completed his best-known novel, Le Diable au corps (1923), at the age of seventeen. A succès de scandale upon its publication, the novel is a semi-autobiographical account of an adolescent boy's affair with the wife of a soldier during World War I. A second novel, Le Bal du comte d'Orgel (1924), was published posthumously.
Radiguet associated with many of the important artists of his time, including composers such as Erik Satie and Georges Auric, painters such as Modigliani and Picasso, and writers such as Max Jacob. Most notable among these connections was his intense, likely romantic relationship with Jean Cocteau.
Raymond Maurice Radiguet was born in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne, close to Paris. He was the eldest of the seven surviving children born to Maurice Radiguet (1866-1941), a successful caricaturist, and Marie Radiguet (née Tournier, 1884-1958), who taught at a boarding school. When asked about his mother, Radiguet once said, "Je ne sais pas. Je ne vois jamais son visage. Elle est toujours baissée, en train de relacer les souliers d'un de mes frères et sœurs." [transl. "I don't know. I never see her face. She's always down on her knees tying the shoes of one of my brothers or sisters."] His father was a much more significant presence in his life, and Maurice Radiguet's mixture of permissiveness and near-rivalry with his eldest son heavily influenced the paternal dynamic in Le Diable au corps. Radiguet was also close with his paternal aunt, Eugénie Cordonnier, who provided a steady and sensible presence in the life of the family.
On his mother's side, his family hailed from Martinique; his maternal grandfather had died in a shipwreck off the coast of Havana. Radiguet's lifelong fascination with the French West Indies influenced his characterization of Count d'Orgel's Creole wife, Mahaut, in Le Bal du comte d'Orgel. It has been further suggested that his mother's fear of water, stemming from her father's death, was at the origin of Radiguet's poetic preoccupation with the ocean. Cocteau claimed that Marie Radiguet's origins explained the temperament of her son, who "dort le jour, fume et aime le sucre." [transl. "sleeps during the day, smokes and loves sugar."]
Radiguet's paternal relatives were mainly involved in the sciences. His great-grandfather had founded Radiguet & Fils, a company that manufactured precision scientific instruments. The management of this firm stayed in the family for several generations. A notable relative was Arthur Radiguet (1850-1905), head of Radiguet & Fils and innovator in the field of radiography, who died of radiodermatitis in one of the first such cases observed in France.
Radiguet recounted his earliest memory in the autobiographical Île de France, Île d'Amour:
Je me vois à deux ans mené par ma nourrice tous les matins dans la pension de jeunes filles, d'où ma mère était sortie quatre ans auparavant. La douce tiédeur des genoux, des seins, je ne l'ai jamais retrouvée depuis, comme à ce moment où ces caresses, je les sentais si différentes de celles de ma mère ou de ma nourrice.
[I see myself at two years old, led by my nurse every morning to the girls' boarding school from which my mother had graduated four years earlier. The gentle warmth of knees, of breasts, I have never been able to recover it since, as at that moment when I felt that those caresses were so different from those of my mother or my nurse.]
In the same work, he sets down two childhood memories of death. In one, also drawn on at the beginning of Le Diable au corps, a neighbor's maid commits suicide by throwing herself from a rooftop. In the other, a moment of erotic fascination gives way to horror as, watching a young couple on a swing, he sees the woman fall and break her neck. He later wrote of this incident: "Image digne de la tragédie grecque." (transl. "Image worthy of Greek tragedy").
At six years old, Radiguet was enrolled in the municipal school of Saint-Maur, where he proved an excellent student, and where his brother Paul joined him three years later. In 1917, he entered the Lycée Charlemagne on a scholarship. Once there, however, he began neglecting his schoolwork in order to pursue his own interests in classic literature and was eventually expelled. He decided at that point to make a name for himself as a journalist. His father, concerned about his academic indifference, had him enrolled in classes in Latin and Greek, but Radiguet was more interested in the grand siècle (La Princesse de Clèves was especially formative for him) and he neglected these as well. At this time, as Radiguet tells it, he spent significant amounts of time reading on the shores of the Marne, lying moored in his father's boat. The Marne features prominently in his poetry.
Radiguet found his first literary connection in André Salmon, editor of L'Intransigeant, to whom he brought several caricatures signed "Rajky." Some of his biographers have concluded, from his poor grades in art and the crudeness of his surviving drawings, that these caricatures were likely his father's work. Salmon helped him find work at several newspapers; years later, recalling his impressions on first reading Radiguet's poetry, he writes: "Pas question d'un nouveau Rimbaud. Tout de même, devant soi, un garçon de quinze ans, déjà fort d'une indiscutable conscience poétique." [transl. "No question of a new Rimbaud. All the same, standing before one, a boy of fifteen already endowed with an indisputable poetic consciousness."] Radiguet's first published poem, again under the pseudonym "Raimon Rajky," was "Aiguilles des secondes," which appeared in the September 1918 edition of L'Instant. His first publication under his real name was "Ligne d'horizon," which appeared two months later, in Le Canard enchaîné. In December, he published a short story "Tohu" in the avant-garde journal SIC. In February 1919, he met Max Jacob, with whom he became close at this time. Some contemporaries speculated about the nature of this relationship, with Salmon writing that after only two days Radiguet was addressing Jacob using the familiar tu pronoun.As one of the few writers in the immediate postwar milieu who had been too young to fight, Radiguet found himself an outsider in the generational struggle between modernists who were firmly established prior to World War I—Jacob and Salmon, along with SIC and its editor Pierre Albert-Birot, were among these—and the younger generation, most of whom had fought in the war and many of whom were still mobilized. This younger generation found a voice in Pierre Reverdy's magazine Nord-Sud, and then in Dada. Radiguet made an attempt to ingratiate himself with this new avant-garde without alienating his older connections. This was partly successful (Radiguet is hailed as one of the "Parisian friends" [amis parisiens] of Dada in a poem by Tristan Tzara), but social miscalculations and a poor impression on Louis Aragon damaged these inroads. An example of such a miscalculation was a poem Radiguet sent to Guillaume Apollinaire, which alluded through its incipit "un édredon rouge..." [transl. "a red quilt..."] to a line of Apollinaire's "Zone": "Une famille transporte un édredon rouge comme vous transportez votre cœur." [transl. "A family transports a red quilt as you transport your heart."] This gesture offended Apollinaire rather than endearing Radiguet to him.
Radiguet's relationship with Jean Cocteau began in 1919. Despite Cocteau's characteristically dramatic account of their first meeting, it is uncertain at which literary soirée they first made personal contact. On Radiguet's first being introduced at Cocteau's home, the butler announced him this way: "Monsieur, c'est un enfant avec une canne." [transl. "Sir, it's a child with a cane."] The nature of their relationship has been the source of much speculation. Cocteau was famously homosexual, and Radiguet was only the most significant in a series of eroticized mentor-mentee relationships in Cocteau's life. While there is no positive evidence that the two were ever romantically or sexually involved, Radiguet's biographer Monique Nemer concludes that: il est quand même bien difficile de douter de la réalité amoureuse, et sexuelle, des rapports de Jean Cocteau et Raymond Radiguet. [transl. "it is in any case quite difficult to doubt the amorous—and sexual—reality of the relations between Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet."] Cocteau was possessive toward his protégé: during a long absence from Paris, he dispatched friends like Georges Auric to watch over Radiguet and keep him from "les miasmes des monts Martre et Parnasse." [transl. "the miasma of monts Martre and Parnasse."] Cocteau's correspondence with Radiguet during this period, entailing letters sent almost daily despite the infrequency of Radiguet's responses, resulted in Maurice Radiguet demanding explanations from Cocteau.