Obituary: Robert Merle

A GREAT scholar of English language and literature, Robert Merle was the popular author of a vast historical sequence of novels, Fortune de France, in 13 500-page volumes, which he began in 1977 aged nearly 70 and completed in 2003 with Le Glaive et les amours ("Love and the Sword") when he was 95. Yet this wide-ranging panorama was only a small part of his academic and literary achievements.

He was born in 1908 in Algeria, at the ancient fortified town of Tebessa where his father, Felix, was an interpreter with a perfect knowledge of literary and spoken Arabic. He had a very fine library of French books that his young son eagerly explored. Felix Merle was killed in 1916 in the Dardanelles. Robert returned with his mother to Paris, where he received an excellent education at three great lycees and the Sorbonne; he specialised in English language and literature.

He was to hold several positions as professor at various universities until in 1939 he was drafted to Lille as an interpreter for the British army. When, in 1940, the German tanks and air force attacked France, he found himself at the centre of hostilities at Dunkirk, on the beach of Zuydcoote where the British were making their tragic and heroic withdrawal. He remembered that embarkation as a "blind and abominable lottery" in which he was one of the lucky few who survived. But he was taken prisoner to Stalag VID at Dortmund, from which he escaped only to be recaptured at Belgian customs. He was finally repatriated in July 1943. After the war, he was awarded the Croix du Combattant. He remained a pacifist - decrying the folly of all wars.

Demobilised, Merle put his memories of wartime action into the first drafts of what was to become a sensational success, a war novel, Week- end a Zuydcoote (Weekend at Zuydcoote, 1949) about the Dunkirk disaster. It is about a handful of French soldiers left helpless and dazed in the terrible confusion, a situation reminiscent of Stendhal's portrayal of Fabrice del Dongo's disarray at the Battle of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839 ).

Like most authors, Merle had trouble in finding a publisher, until his book was snapped up by Gaston Gallimard. In those days, publishers were still afraid of erotic intensity and foul language: they complained of too many obscenities and steamy sex scenes. For example, in Merle's very first chapter we meet the main character, the soldier Maillat, accompanying a former Paris taxi-driver who is wheeling the corpse of a young woman on a handcart. Her short summer dress is pulled up over her stomach, revealing a pair of quivering pink thighs. The taxi-driver keeps trying to pull her skirt down on the way to the mortuary.

True to his type, the taxi- driver has a wonderful vocabulary of insults and coarse sexual expressions. They keep pausing for breath, and to smoke cigarettes because of the foul stink coming from the corpse. During one of these halts under a blistering sun, the taxi- driver describes in pungent detail how he used to pick up girls during the night and use his taxi as a travelling brothel:

Those broads, not worth the effort. Me, I takes them sitting down back of the cab, with the tart backside up knelt in front of me, like. . .

But prominent literary figures such as Raymond Queneau and Jean- Paul Sartre insisted on its being published, and to the astonishment of all, Merle included, the novel won that season's Goncourt Prize. It is the best modern novel about war, far surpassing Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead or James Jones's From Here to Eternity or Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy. In fact, it has been equalled only by another French novelist, Jean Dutourd, with Les Taxis de la Marne (The Taxis of the Marne, 1956).

In 1964, Merle's masterpiece was made into a formidable film by Henri Verneuil, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo: it made them both famous. Merle himself was responsible for the scenario, helped by Francois Boyer. Music was by Maurice Jarre. The cast included Catherine Spaak, Georges Geret, Jean-Pierre Marielle and Francois Perier. It was a box-office hit, and is often televised. His 1967 novel Un Animal doue de raison, translated as The Day of the Dolphin (1969), was made into a film of the same name by Mike Nichols, starring George C. Scott.

After winning the Goncourt, Robert Merle might have spent the remainder of his life resting on his laurels, or just devoting himself entirely to writing. But he loved teaching English literature, as his old students have often recalled. He was a good translator, and did not waste his talent on trash. Among his admirable translations are Jonathan Swift with Voyage a Lilliput (1956), Voyage a Brobdingnag (1959) and Voyage chez les Houyhnhynms (1960).

Among his plays there is his wonderfully rumbustious and hell-for- leather version of John Webster's The White Devil (with the help of a friend, Thomas Dekker). Merle wisely gave his version a title taken from the name of the chief male monster, Flamineo. It was revived last September at the Gaite, Montparnasse, and I thoroughly enjoyed its rodomontades flung at the public with such chilling relish.