André Pieyre de Mandiargues
André Pieyre de Mandiargues was a French writer born on March 14, 1909, in Paris, into a family embedded in the arts. His upbringing in artistic circles fostered his early passion for poetry, leading him to explore diverse literary influences, including Surrealism, Gothic literature, and Romanticism. Although he became part of the Surrealist movement in 1947, he did not publish his first work until 1943, during a period when he sought refuge in Monte Carlo from the Nazi occupation. His initial collection, "Dans les années sordides," marked the beginning of a prolific career that included short stories, poetry, and art criticism, with notable works such as "Le Musée noir" and "Les Masques de Leonor Fini."
Mandiargues gained wider recognition in the English-speaking world through the translation of his novels, particularly "La Motocyclette," which explores themes of sensuality and identity intertwined with machinery. His acclaimed work "La Marge," which earned the prestigious Prix Goncourt, delves into existential themes surrounding loss and avoidance. Mandiargues passed away on December 13, 1991, leaving behind a legacy that reflects a unique blend of the grotesque, erotic, and philosophical insights into human experience.
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Subject Terms
André Pieyre de Mandiargues
Writer
- Born: March 14, 1909
- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Died: December 13, 1991
- Place of death: Paris, France
Biography
André Pieyre de Mandiargues was born on March 14, 1909, in Paris, France, the son of David Pieyre de Mandiargues and his wife Lucie, daughter of the minor French Impressionist painter Paul Berard. Growing up in artistic circles in Paris nurtured Pieyre de Mandiargues’s creativity, and from his childhood he was writing poetry. He read widely, not only the works of the reigning literary group in Paris (Andre Breton’s circle of Surrealists, which he joined in 1947), but also the Elizabethans, Edgar Allan Poe, and the German Romantics. As different as those three influences are, they share a taste for the grotesque and a mixture of the erotic and the morbid, and that combination surfaces in Pieyre de Mandiargues’s fiction.
Though he came of age between the two World Wars, when Paris was the literary center of the Western world, and he received a great deal of attention from established writers, Pieyre de Mondiargues did not publish until 1943. Fleeing to Monte Carlo to escape the Nazis, he fell in with a refugee group of writers who convinced him to publish his work. His first published book was a collection of prose poems entitled Dans les années sordides (1943).
Returning to Paris after World War II, he produced a collection of short stories, Le Musée noir (1946); a second volume of poems, Les Incongruités monumentales (1948); and a nonfiction book which launched his career as an art critic, Les Masques de Leonor Fini (1951). The English-speaking world discovered Pieyre de Mondiargues in 1958, when his novel Le Lis de Mer (1956) was translated as The Girl Beneath the Lion. Several more of his books were translated over the next decade, and his most famous book in the United States, his novel La Motocyclette (1963), was translated twice: The Motorcycle (1965) and The Girl on the Motorcycle (1967). The story of a nineteen-year-old girl who rides her motorbike to meet her lover lingers on the sensuous description of her leather outfit and the bike’s hardware, confusing the distinction between the machine and the girl and questioning which was the master and which was the servant.
Pieyre de Mondiargues’s novel La Marge (1967; The Margin, 1969) received the prestigious Prix Goncourt, confirming that he was a world-class writer. The novel tells of the two-day wanderings of a man trying to avoid learning the details of the unexpected and premature death of his wife. Pieyre de Mondiargues died on December 13, 1991, survived by his wife, the Italian artist Bona Tibertelli, whom he married in 1950, and their daughter Sibylle.