Unwrapping Pierre Loti
Lauded in his lifetime, member of the Académie française, Pierre Loti sank into obscurity. With the centenary of his death, there has been a rekindling of interest.
Pierre Loti began life as Julien Viaud. He adopted the nom de plume Pierre Loti in 1876 after a Tahitian queen re-named him after a native rose.
It is hard to know where Pierre Loti starts and Julien Viaud ends. His writings draw heavily on his intimate journals written over the course of his life. But those journals themselves dally with reality.
Loti is hard to pin down. A cocooned child who shunned the company of others. A gifted artist who showed little early interest in having his work published. A missionary manqué who opted for life in the navy. A promiscuous libertine who sought the company of sailors. A recipient of the Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur who loved dressing up in full make-up.
A canter through his early life sheds some light on these apparent contradictions. He was born in 1850 in Rochefort to a bourgeois family. His father a catholic, his mother with deep protestant roots in the l'Ile d'Oléron.
His early life is described in the retrospective “Roman d’enfant”, written when Loti was 40. His biographer Bruno Vercier labels it autofiction and considers it his finest work.
His attachment to his mother is portrayed as tactile. “When my mother suddenly entered the room by a different door, oh! how I clung to her and covered my face with her dress: it was a supreme protection, the sanctuary where no harm could reach me, the harbour of harbours where the storm is forgotten.”
He was an over-protected youngster. Home educated until he was 12, when he did finally go to school, he was always chaperoned to and from the school gates. During days spent on the beach, he was forced to shelter under a parasol to the amusement of other children.
The family’s anxiety for his safety was mirrored in his for them. “As a child I would never permit any members of the family to leave the house to go walking or visiting without first obtaining their assurance of a speedy homecoming. "You will come back soon?" I would ask, as I followed them to the door.”
He writes at length about the influence of his sister Marie and his brother Gustave, 19 and 14 years older respectively. Marie by her constant tender presence at his side, Gustave from afar. Marie, herself a gifted artist, encouraged Loti’s burgeoning talent. Gustave, a surgeon in the French navy, sent letters home from exotic lands, sparking young Julien’s imagination.
But what of his father? Barely a mention in the novel. He worked for the Rochefort council and was accused of embezzlement. Despite clearing his name, he was obliged to make reparations. It hit the family hard. As Loti wrote “La pauvreté est une excellente école de vie”.
When Loti was 15, the news came of his brother’s death from tropical fever on board ship. He was buried at sea near Sri Lanka. The loss of Gustave clearly had a devastating impact on young Julien, darkening the hues of his imaginative palette.
In “Roman d’enfant” he describes his first encounter with the sea: “Suddenly I stopped overcome, almost paralyzed by fear, for something took shape before me, something dark and surging sprang up from all sides while at the same time seeming to stretch out endlessly. It was so dark a green as to be almost black; to me it seemed unstable, perfidious, all-engulfing, always turbulent, and of a sinister, menacing aspect. The emotion that overwhelmed me in the presence of the sea was not only one of fear, but also of inexpressible sadness, the anguish of desolation, bereavement and exile.”
Despite this, he embarks on a life of service in the navy. He enrols in the naval school at Brest. His training takes him to Algiers and South America. At Dakar in 1871 he starts to record his impressions in a series of drawings. Later that year, he heads to Valparaiso and onwards to Tahiti. En route, the ship makes a stop at Easter Island, where Loti makes further sketches. These are published in L’Illustration in 1872 together with accompanying extracts from his journal.
In 1874 he requests a transfer to the military gymnastics school at Joinville. Short of stature, Loti always felt unhappy in his own skin. After six months’ training at Joinville, he sculpted himself an impressive new physique and took to being photographed nude.
In 1877 he is sent to Turkey. There he meets a Circassian beauty, an odalisque in the harem of a Turkish dignitary. A passionate love affair ensues. The events are described in “Aziyadé”, his break-through novel written in 1879. On a subsequent visit to Constantinople, he learns of his lover’s death from grief and ostracism.
In 1883 he writes “Mon frère Yves”. It is based on time spent in western Brittany with Loti’s shipmate and bosom-buddy Pierre Le Cor, a native of Rosporden. Pierre introduces Loti to Breton life, reflected later in “Pêcheur d'Islande”, his most famous novel published in 1886.
Also in 1883 Loti’s sails for Annam abord the Atalante to join a French strike force against the local Vietnamese. The French were seeking to extend their influence in the north of the country and access the lucrative Chinese markets, following the British lead in their Opium Wars.
Alongside his naval duties, Loti was a war correspondent for Le Figaro. He was a natural choice - a celebrated writer and first-hand observer. However, his reports of the Battle of Thuận An near Huế rocked French public opinion. After bombardment from the sea, the French Marines went ashore. Loti describes how the Marines laid bets on the total slain. In the final reckoning some 2,500 locals to a dozen wounded French. In his report, Loti describes a particularly gruesome scene where a Marine forces his bayonet through a stricken man’s clenched teeth, finally transfixing him to the ground.
Loti was recalled to France to give an account of himself to the military authorities. The French Press were particularly exercised, questioning the veracity of his reports. Certain passages bore a strong resemblance to Flaubert’s “Salammbô” and others to battle scenes in “The Iliad”.
In 1885 Loti arrives in Nagasaki, Japan, with his Breton shipmate Pierre Le Cor. Pierre becomes the model for Yves in “Madame Chrysanthème”, published in 1887. As was common practice at the time, Loti contracted a short-term arranged marriage, establishing a household in the hills overlooking the port.
A word about Nagasaki. From the early 1600s, under the Tokugawa Shogunate, Japan had been closed and Christianity banned. The only Europeans tolerated were the Dutch, strictly confined to the man-made island of Dejima off Nagasaki. In 1853 everything changed when American warships appeared in Tokyo harbour, forcing Japan to open for business. In 1854 the Convention of Kanagawa made Nagasaki a treaty port with preferential rights for foreigners. The Meiji Restoration in 1868 further accelerated Japan’s industrialisation.
Loti, a die-hard traditionalist, cavilled at what he saw. In Madame Chysanthème he writes “I feel more fully Japan’s antediluvian antiquity, its centuries of mummification, which will soon degenerate into hopeless and grotesque buffoonery, as it comes into contact with Western novelties.”
He was not alone. Rudyard Kipling first arrived in Nagasaki in 1887, two years after Loti, and he too lamented the country’s pell-mell espousal of Western ways. He writes he would like to "tear up the railway and pull down the telegraph poles".
It is interesting to compare Loti and Kipling’s first impressions. Where Loti largely looks down his Gallic nose at the Japanese, Kipling is an admirer. In his travel notes “From Sea to Sea” he records that, on entering a Japanese house “I passed in, feeling for the first time that I was a barbarian, and no true Sahib.”
On Loti’s return from Japan in 1886, he marries a lady from a well-established Bordeaux family. His first and only legitimate son is born two years later.
With “Pêcheur d'Islande” and “Madame Chrysanthème”, Loti’s reputation is established. In 1891, he becomes a member of the Académie française, defeating Emile Zola in the process.
He is fêted by the literati of the day. He was a close friend of Alphonse Daudet. Proust regarded Loti as a major influence and was able to quote large sections of “Roman d’enfant” by heart. Henry James wrote glowing critiques. A voracious reading public eagerly lapped up Loti’s exotic descriptions of far-off places.
In 1894, while based in Hendaye, Loti meets Crucita, a young Basque, who becomes his mistress. He sets her up in Rochefort and she gives him four sons, three of whom survive.
Loti’s literary output continues unabated, almost a book a year. Much of his writing is tied to his regular naval assignments. Despite his literary fame, he remains committed to the navy, only retiring in 1909 after 40 years of service, 20 of those spent at sea.
He exhibits a profound sense of duty. In 1914, learning his sons have been conscripted, he bursts into tears and decides to follow them, enlisting at the age of 64. He penned daily articles from the trenches in Verdun, and was only demobilised in 1918 due to ill-health.
He died of a stroke in 1923 and was buried on l'île d'Oléron. The house where he was born in Rochefort is now a museum. Apart from his Spartan writing room, the house is lavishly themed throughout, crammed with artifacts from his life abroad. It was here that he held his extravagant costumed parties.
Sarah Bernhardt recalled that at their first two meetings, Loti arrived dressed successively in traditional Japanese, then Turkish attire. Ahead of their third meeting, she asked if he might just come as a 19th-century Frenchman.
But it was not just dressing up. On his extended stays abroad, Loti went to great lengths to assimilate into the local culture. In Turkey he felt particularly at home. He dressed as a local, studied the language, lodged in a native district and shunned the company of other foreigners. He held Cook’s tourists, particularly the English, in very low regard.
His contract marriage in Japan was likely inspired by similar motives. And his subsequent exasperation, evident in Madame Chrysanthème, may have stemmed from his frustration at being unable to lift the lid on Japanese culture. In “La troisième jeunesse de Madame Prune” based on a visit to Japan 15 years later, Loti appears far more at ease.
Following his death his reputation suffered. A French woman journalist revealed she, together with two Turkish ladies, had duped Loti into writing his 1906 novel “Les Désenchantées”. Subsequently André Breton and his fellow surrealists were outspokenly critical. It was only in 1971 when literary semiologist Roland Barthes championed Loti that he came to public attention again.
Nothing ends well in Loti’s world. None of his books have a happy ending. Everything is tinged with nostalgia and an overwhelming sense of impending fate.
As a child he kept a museum of treasures in the attic, full of knick-knacks sent from afar. He writes that in his imagination he had already visited these far-off lands long before he ever stepped on board a ship.
In the many photographs taken of Loti, he always seems unsettled. He stares beyond the camera, his attention perhaps drawn to the limitless horizon, the infinite solitude of dark fathomless waters.
