"Supple and sophisticated, Franois Truffaut and Friends tells an affecting story-several stories-and does so with verve."-Dudley Andrew, professor of comparative literature and film studies, Yale University

"We discover-in Robert Stam's sexy, startling, and infinitely entangled plot-that hyperbolic infidelity may indeed inspire felicitous creativity, which makes this book essential reading not only for all those impassioned by modernist autobiography and New Wave cinema, but even more important in our times, for those who wish to celebrate the joyful wisdom of erotic values."-Allen S. Weiss, author of Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon

One of Franois Truffaut's most poignantly memorable films, Jules and Jim, adapted a novel by the French writer and art collector Henri-Pierre Roch. The characters and events of the 1960s film were based on a real-life romantic triangle, begun in the summer of 1920, which involved Roch himself, the German-Jewish writer Franz Hessel, and his wife, the journalist Helen Grund.

Drawing on this film and others by Truffaut, Robert Stam provides the first in-depth examination of the multifaceted relationship between Truffaut and Roch. In the process, he provides a unique lens through which to understand how adaptation works-from history to novel, and ultimately to film-and how each form of expression is inflected by the period in which it is created. Truffaut's adaptation of Roch's work, Stam suggests, demonstrates how reworkings can be much more than simply copies of their originals; rather, they can become an immensely creative enterprise-a form of writing in itself.

The book also moves beyond Truffaut's film and the mnage--trois involving Roch, Hessel, and Grund to explore the intertwined lives and work of other famous artists and intellectuals, including Marcel Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, and Charlotte Wolff. Tracing the tangled webs that linked these individuals' lives, Stam opens the door to an erotic/writerly territory where the complex interplay of various artistic sensibilities-all mulling over the same nucleus of feelings and events-vividly comes alive.

Robert Stam is University Professor at New York University, where he teaches a course on the French New Wave. He has published widely on French and comparative literature, film, and theory.

Contents
Prelude
1. The Origins of Truffaut's Jules and Jim
2. The New Wave and Adaptation
3. The Prototype for Jim: Henri-Pierre Roché
4. New York Interlude
5. The Don Juan Books
6. The Prototype for Jules: Franz Hessel and Flânerie
7. Hessel as Novelist
8. Hessel's Parisian Romance
9. The Prototype for Catherine: Helen Grund Hessel
10. L'Amour Livresque
11. The Polyphonic Project
12. Jules and Jim: The Novel
13. From Novel to Film
14. Disarming the Spectator
15. Polyphonic Eroticism
16. Sexperimental Writing: The Diaries
17. Sexuality/Textuality
18. The Gendered Politics of Flânerie
19. Comparative Écriture
20. Two English Girls: The Novel
21. Two English Girls: The Film
22. The (Various) Men Who Loved (Various) Women
Postlude
Timeline
Notes
Index

FROM CHAPTER 1:

Initially conceived in the early 1920s during the first clutches of the Henri-Pierre Roch-Helen Hessel-Franz Hessel mnage, Jules and Jim was initially drafted as a novel in 1943 and finally published in 1953. After reading the novel, Franois Truffaut turned it into a film in 1961. According to Truffaut his reading of the novel in 1955 created such a strong impression that it cued his choice of profession: he felt that he simply had to film it. Truffaut corresponded with Roch between 1955 and 1958 about a possible adaptation and visited with him at his home in Meudon, where the pair developed a strong personal rapport. Truffaut writes of their encounter: "[Roch] was tall and slender, and had the same sweetness as his characters. He resembled Marcel Duchamp, of whom he spoke constantly. Painting was his great passion."1 Truffaut's encounter with Roch and with Jules and Jim had seminal importance, then, for the history of the cinema in that it catalyzed the filmic vocation of a director who was to become a key figure both in auteur theory and in the French New Wave.

The Truffaut adaptation thus presents a number of salient and somewhat anomalous features in terms of film-novel relations: (1) the crucial impact of a novel on a filmmaker's career, (2) the close personal rapport between novelist and filmmaker, and (3) the redemptive role of the adaptation for the novelist's career. As will become clear over the course of this text, Truffaut's sympathetic rapport with the then octogenarian Roch was deeply rooted in Truffaut's biography. Like Roch, Truffaut had a complicated love/hate relationship with his mother, and, like Roch, he had never really known his biological father. Perhaps as a result Truffaut became attached to a number of substitute father figures, notably Roch himself, Jean Genet, and especially, Andr Bazin, who became clear paternal surrogates for Truffaut. Even before his encounter with Roch, Truffaut wrote to his friend Robert Lachenay that "Bazin and Genet did more for me in three weeks than my parents did in fifteen years."2 As Dudley Andrew explains in his indispensable critical biography of Bazin, Truffaut's stepfather, after learning the whereabouts of his runaway stepson through an ad for the "Film Addict's Club," arranged for the stepson's arrest and imprisonment. At that point a furious Bazin began a campaign to convince the authorities to release the boy into his care. Later, when Truffaut was placed in military prison for desertion, the Bazins drove to the prison to see him, using the "strategic lie" that they were his parents.3 In a kind of literalization of the Freudian "family romance," in which the resentful child conjures up ideal substitute parents, Truffaut was virtually adopted by Bazin and his wife, with whom he went to live during a very difficult period. Whereas Truffaut's stepfather mistreated him, and even had him sent to jail, Bazin protected him, snatching him from the pitiless jaws of the French justice system.

It is well-known that Truffaut painted a hostile portrait of his parents in his first feature, The 400 Blows. And indeed, Truffaut's parents recognized their son's aggressivity, their pain aggravated by press reviews of the film that described the mother in the film in terms worthy of a narcissistic whore in love with nothing but her own body. In his response to an angry letter from his stepfather Truffaut acknowledged that he "knew [the film] would cause [them] pain" but that he did not care because "since Bazin's death, I no longer have any parents." Truffaut further explained to his stepfather that "although I silently hated mother, I liked you even while I despised you."4 At the same time, Truffaut's perhaps disproportionate outrage partially displaces his intensely eroticized relationship with his mother. This feeling is captured in the many shots, in The 400 Blows, of the mother's legs and in the film's fetishistic preoccupation with her stockings and makeup. Truffaut's hostile feelings about his mother, at their height around the time of The 400 Blows, were still raw even at the moment of her death some years later, to the point that Truffaut hesitated even to go to her funeral.

The Truffaut-Roch friendship offers a case of cross-generational identification, a strange confluence of adolescent rebellion and twilight-of-life nostalgia. Truffaut was intrigued by the notion of a first novel by an old man, one with whom he felt an uncanny bond. In his adaptation Truffaut claimed that he tried to make the film "as if he himself were very old, as if he were at the end of his life."5 And Roch, conversely, was equally intrigued by Truffaut, seeing in him, perhaps, an artistic heir and adoptive son. Enthusiastic about Truffaut's short film Les Mistons, which he screened in 1957, Roch decided that Truffaut was the ideal director for Jules and Jim.6 Roch was not completely unfamiliar with the world of cinema, having dabbled in the buying and selling of films and having worked briefly as a screenwriter for Abel Gance on the film Napolon. Roch also approved, on the basis of photos, the casting of Jeanne Moreau as Catherine. Thus, the real-life lover of the fiercely independent Helen Hessel ironically came to exercise power, at a time when Helen was still alive, over her representation in the film. Truffaut even planned to ask Roch to write dialogue for the Catherine character, but the plan had to be given up when Roch died on April 9, 1959, just a few days after approving Truffaut's choice of lead actress.7

Truffaut had a highly fraught, almost Hamlet-like, relationship with his mother, whom he resented not only for what he saw as her maternal neglect but also for what he regarded as her "promiscuous" behavior. A moment in The 400 Blows captures this sexual jealousy. On a day that Antoine and his friend Ren have skipped school, the mother and son both catch each other in a "crime": the mother catches the son "playing hooky" from school, but at the very same moment the son catches the mother "playing hooker," at least in the son's fevered imagination, as he observes her engaging in a public, adulterous kiss. For Anne Gillain, Truffaut's tortured relationship with his mother is "the lost secret" that provides the key to his entire oeuvre. All of Truffaut's films constitute, for Gillain, an unconscious interrogation of "a distant, ambiguous, inaccessible, maternal figure" reminiscent of his own mother, Janine de Montferrand.8 Although Truffaut's oeuvre provides very varied responses to this enigmatic figure, she nonetheless "remains always at the very source of his creative dynamic."9

At the same time, Truffaut never knew his biological father. Truffaut was an "illegitimate child," recognized and given a name by his stepfather Roland Truffaut. Truffaut's Baisers vols indirectly recounts the story of the young Truffaut's research (in 1968) into the identity of his real father, who turned out to be a German-Jewish dentist named Roland Levy.10 Truffaut reacted ambivalently to the discovery, on the one hand declaring that he had always felt Jewish-a feeling that links him to the Jewish Franz Hessel-and on the other opting not to contact the man who had played such an important role in his life.11 Truffaut often identified with literal and symbolic orphans. In Le Plaisir des yeux Truffaut expresses his admiration for "orphan" filmmakers like D. W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Mizoguchi, Sergei Eisenstein, and Erich von Stroheim-all "orphans" in his view because their spiritual fathers were dead.12 As Gillain suggests, Truffaut was doubtless intrigued by the fact that his mother alone possessed the key to the identity of his real father and thus the secret of his origins.13 The obsession with mothers impacted Truffaut's tastes and sensibility and ultimately the films themselves. In his Correspondence Truffaut claimed to have a special shelf reserved for books "all about mothers." Invoking the names of Georges Simenon, Georges Bataille, Marcel Pagnol, and Roger Peyrefitte, Truffaut argued that the books about mothers were invariably the best books by the writers in question.14

An anxiety about paternity and origins, as Gillain suggests, feeds even the most apparently trivial details of Truffaut's films, for example the brief references to abortion and Cesarean section in The 400 Blows. In his films Truffaut took advantage of the psychic energies provoked by his secret, but he also took pains not to probe that secret too closely, carefully camouflaging the autobiographical dimension of his work, preferring to leave undisturbed the psychic springs of his creativity. Truffaut's films, for Gillain, thus allow for a double reading. The films simultaneously project two stories, one realist and obedient to cause-and-effect logic, the other phantasmatic, where the son tries to understand and dialogue, if only symbolically, with the absent and resented mother.

Like all creators, Truffaut makes films partially in order to move beyond childhood and become an adult. It is no accident, in this context, that Truffaut's films proliferate in references to writing, in ways that are often linked to sexual anxiety and aspiration. In a 1975 interview Truffaut acknowledged writing as an integral part of what might be called his creative DNA: "I can't get away from writing. In all my films there are people who send each other letters, a young girl who writes in her diary. . . . [That] simply is not done any more, but it's in my character."15 In Truffaut's early short film Les Mistons, the titular rascals express their sexual frustration and aggressivity by sabotaging Bernadette's (Bernadette Lafont) love affair by writing on fences, tree trunks, and city walls, with the writing constantly increasing in size and intensity and public visibility, so that the object of the aggression will finally notice.

Truffaut saw filmmaking and writing as profoundly personal: "Tomorrow's film appears to me as even more personal than a novel, as individual and autobiographical as a confession or a diary. Young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person."16 Truffaut's first full-length feature, The 400 Blows, in this same sense, proliferates in references both to writing and to paternal/parental authority in ways that lend credence to a psychoanalytic interpretation. The credit sequence-a series of tracking shots of Paris culminating in an image of the cinmathque franaise-renders homage to the film "library" where Truffaut's "reading" of old films inspired and informed his subsequent "writing" of new films. The first postcredit shot shows a pupil writing, initiating a whole series of writerly references. Antoine gains vengeance against his teacher by chalking a poem on the wall and is punished by having to conjugate a sentence-in writing. Indeed, Antoine mimics his mother's penmanship in an excuse note. Learning French composition, his mother tells him, is invaluable, since "one always has to write letters." He subsequently steals a typewriter so that the principal will not recognize his handwriting, and as a runaway he falls asleep next to a printing press. Film too can be seen as a machine crire, a machine for writing.