Aymé, Marcel

(1902-1967)

   writer

   Marcel Aymé was born in Joingy and, after a childhood spent in the countryside, came to Paris (1925), where he held various jobs. Later, he became a journalist. The success of his account La Jument verte (1933), in which sexuality is the source of satirical comedy, allowed him to dedicate himself to writing. The novels of Aymé often explore rural life and are descriptions, too, of the mediocrity and hypocrisy that he observed. This pessimism is apparent in Travelingue (1941), and especially in Le Chemin des écoliers (1946), Le Vin de Paris (1947), and Uranus (1948). All bear ironic witness to the period of the occupation and the Liberation of World War II. To mitigate the boredom of modern life, Marcel Aymé resorted to imaginative, picturesque, and hilarious characters (La Table-aux-crevés, (1929); Le Boeuf clandestine, 1939) in familiar tales of the real and the imaginary (La Vouivre, 1943). His taste for the lively vernacular, both rural and Parisian, is represented skillfully in brief and incisive narration, and his sense of parody is original and remarkable. An imaginative realism colors his accounts in Passe-muraille (1943) and in the Contes du chat perché (1934, augmented in 1950 and 1958)—"simple stories without love or money," which combine, with a knowing naïveté, the marvels and the daily routine of rustic life. interested in film, which often transposed his work, Aymé also wrote for the theater: Lucienne et le Boucher (1932) and Clérambard (1950) are truculent comedies, while La Tête des autres (1952) is a bitter satire on bourgeois justice. Aymé has done two adaptations of works by Arthur Miller: Les Socières de Salem (1954) and Vu du Pont (1958).