Review: Geoffrey O’Brien on C. F. Ramuz

I came upon this book‘s 1944 edition on my parents’ bookshelves when I was around eleven, attracted irresistibly by its doom-laden prologue …

Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s 1922 novel, Présence de la Mort, is just out in a new translation by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan under the title Into the Sun. The book was previously published in 1944 as The End of All Men, in a version by Allan Ross Macdougall, but since that time it has rarely been a point of reference in the literary Anglosphere. Only a handful of Ramuz’s twenty-two novels (which appeared between 1905 and 1942) have been translated at all, but with this new edition and a recent edition of his Great Fear on the Mountain there are welcome signs of fresh attention.

A dominant figure among modern Swiss writers—born in the canton of Vaud to which, after a youthful decade in Paris, he returned for the rest of his life—Ramuz characteristically situates his work in mountain villages at a distance from modern ways, places remote enough that we are not always sure what century we are in. An intense sense of place accompanied by an equally intense sense of isolation often sets the tone. This world apart gives him the freedom to write books that are as much poems as novels, couched in a stylized version of the rhythms and bare declarations of ordinary speech, and having the visual force of a silent movie or a rock formation painted by Cézanne.

Both translations of Présence de la Mort evade its title. “Presence of Death” must have seemed impossibly bald and matter-of-fact; the substitutions are more suggestive of apocalyptic science fiction. Technically the book is indeed just that. It begins with a “crucial message” delivered by telegraph across oceans: something has gone awry with gravity, and the earth will be drawn irrevocably into the sun. “And so all life will come to an end … The heat will rise and rapidly everything will die.” Here, at the end of the very brief opening chapter, the tale has already been told. What follows is merely the gradual stripping away of everything—habit, identity, vegetation, water—that is not the presence of death.

I came upon the 1944 edition among my parents’ books when I was around eleven, attracted irresistibly by this doom-laden prologue, and caught by the vivid directness of the natural descriptions that followed. Ramuz’s vocabulary was deceptively simple and concrete, laying out with a strange calm the stages of an absolute annihilation. At the end of the 1950s that theme was inevitably associated with the overhanging image of nuclear holocaust, whether in Stanley Kramer’s widescreen drama On the Beach or the late Tom Lehrer’s disturbing and hilarious “We Will All Go Together When We Go”—a song whose title is echoed by a random tram passenger in Ramuz’s book: “The only difference is that we’ll go together, instead of going alone.”