BIOGRAPHIE | Catherine Rey

Biography

I was born on a 24th of November. My mother had already given birth to three sons. Seeing a girl slipping out of her womb would have been a surprise. Anyhow, I had to be named. She hadn't thought of it. The nurse suggested to call me Catherine, November 24th being Saint Catherine's Eve. I will always be grateful to this good lady. It doesn’t take more than a glance at the calendar to see which first names, often unfortunate, I dodged. I love my Christian name. I love even more the patronages under which I have lived : that of Catherine of Alexandria, a young woman audacious enough to challenge the Emperor Maxentius and ended up, like all rebels, on the wheel of torture before being beheaded, and the second, less bloody, of Catherine of Siena who left beautiful writings. 

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I was the fruit of an accident. Three weeks after my birth, my mother - was it my father who took care of the matter ? – flung me in a cot and drove me to my paternal grandparents where I was left forever. My grandparents had left school at an early age. We had few books at home. Imagination made up for it. The power of imagination. First came the stories of the past, the early years lived in Western Australia where my grandparents had sailed as young migrants and where my father was born. There was a whole world there, within earshot, another extraordinary world called Australia. Bassendean. The swamps. The sand. The desert. The Swan Valley vineyards. The gold rush. Their house. From Bassendean, near Perth, we received regular news thanks to Yvonne Richard, my grandmother's faithful French friend who lived there. The two women were born the same year. Their eldest child was the same age. Brought back from Western Australia, there were also the fat books my father used to read as a child, books written in large fonts in a foreign language, the English language. There were eating habits to which my grandparents had remained attached: porridge, tea, plum pudding, Lamington, lemon tarts, ketchup. Vegemite, unavailable in France, was replaced by anchovy paste. There was a spirit too : the distinctive spirit of the pioneers, of skilled men and women, handy, imaginative, inventive by force of circumstance because their survival depended on it. Thanks to my grandparents who imparted me with a different knowledge, the art of resourcefulness and the art of making ends meet, basically everything they had learned in a country which was at the time, 1912, nothing but a vast desert, I received a parallel education a young girl from the small bourgeoisie would have never been given. I inherited not only knowledge, but also a

certain spirit. My heroines look like Calamity Jane, the kind of birds who know how to hammer a nail in and handle a gun. 

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This is where the writer is shaped, in this crucible of childhood where he constantly returns. In this crucible, everything is brewed. I started writing when I was seventeen. Very quickly, I knew I wanted to become a writer. Reading had led me to writing. Moreover, the vocation led me to writing. There is an element of grace in this mystery which cannot be explained. Not only does writing impose itself in life, but the most marvelous thing is that it grows and becomes a will. It becomes a way of life, a way of looking at the world and thinking about it. A way of being in the world. Since I’d started writing, I never felt comfortable in the world I lived in. To make a living, I worked first as a teacher when I lived in France, then I got casual work after I arrived in Australia in 1997 as an immigrant : painter of children's furniture, waitress, employee in a burger bar, piano teacher, social worker, hand in a charity shop, casual teacher. I have forgotten some of them. For good reason. My various employments weren’t uplifting. Immigrants usually have to start over from scratch. Even though there was on the one hand a world in which I felt ill at ease, there was on the other hand a world where I was at home. A world where I could freely spread my wings. It was the writing world. A world that accepted me as I was. A world without social ambition, without judgement, without conflict, a world as peaceful as a hermitage. As lonely as a retreat. A world where the core of the person I was could grow. In my eyes, a writer does not write stories. He spends his time watching a life, his own. He studies his soul, turns it this way and that, and in this observation which might seem narcissistic but which is a complex, solitary, sometimes dangerous, he gradually untethers himself from his past, his cultural prejudices, his hereditary habits and the old ruts where his thinking gets usually bogged down. 

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Between the age of eighteen and the age of thirty-four, which was the year of my first publication, I wrote doggedly. I was then a student at the Faculty of Arts in Bordeaux. I got my Capes, a prestigious ranking exam, without realizing that it would take me into a classroom. It turned out that I liked being a teacher, but my life was elsewhere. Meeting George Monti in 1992 was decisive. George Monti, founder of the editions of Le Temps qu'il fait, published in his literary review my first text L'homme en marche, a fictional text on the postman Cheval, then the following year L’Ami intime. A novel. I published other texts with George : Les Jours heureux, Eloge de l’oubli, conventional and guarded novels. They seem today to have been written by someone else. I needed another country to exist to the full. 

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I left France in 1997. My grandparents were dead. My father was dead. I was free to leave. When I arrived in Perth, I had no work and no support: the outcome was disastrous. The price of my freedom was dear, but I was free. I had started to break through, started to free myself from the French literary shackles. The beautiful language le beau style and the respect of narrative conventions are acclaimed to the detriment of originality and modernity of style and thought. The topics often deal with the same themes, the First World War for instance never ended, it comes back at every literary re-entry. I forgot the cross-class “transfuge” very trendy right now. In other words, how one makes one’s way up the social ladder, from the working class to the Parisian literary world. Unfortunately, it never really says how one makes one’s way down. From fame to oblivion. Which is easier, quicker and quite common. Yet the true liberation resided elsewhere: I had run away from the deathly embrace of my dysfunctional family. Curiously, we have to walk out of the grave every morning. I drafted the manuscript of Ce que racontait Jones then wrote Lucy comme les chiens, published in 2001 by George Monti. Lucy is a twenty-eight year old woman, mentally retarded, sold by her mother to an old man for a carton of beers. The text was brutal. Still, it was noticed and awarded. 

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Ce que racontait Jones published in 2003 was very well received in the French literary press thanks to the efforts of Daniel Arsand and Jean-Pierre Sicre who ran Phébus publishing house at the time. Jean-Pierre Sicre supported my work with such enthusiasm that the novel made the short list of two prestigious awards : the Femina and the Renaudot. Lucy comme les chiens was a dark piece of work. Ce que racontait Jones was tinged with the same dark irony. Far from being cruel tales, as they appeared to be in the literary reviews, the two books were nothing but a reflection of my life at the time. An immigrant life. A difficult life. In order to support the launch of Une femme en marche (translated in english - Stepping out -) published with Phébus, I stayed in France from 2006 to 2008. After two years, it seemed wiser to go back to Australia. I still had a lot to do over there.

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In 2013, The Spruiker's Tale, English translation of Ce que racontait Jones, met with surprising success in the Australian press. The quality of Andrew Riemer's translation had a lot to do with it. I salute here the invaluable help of my friend Alain Monteil, cultural attaché, who had dropped a name, mine, in Andrew's ear. The Spruiker's Tale was launched by Giramondo, a publishing house run by Ivor Indyk who enabled me to return to Australia by employing me as a research fellow at UWS. Une femme en marche appeared two years later in Julie Rose's translation. Stepping out. Meanwhile, Joëlle Losfeld, an excellent publisher, had launched Les extraordinaires aventures de John Lofty Oakes. It was in 2010. 

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But the journey requires much more. A translation will never be more than a translation, however excellent it may be. I remembered Milan Kundera whose work I studied as part of my PhD. Kundera had attempted this difficult shift of changing language, from Czech to French, a major endeavor which earned him the wrath of the literary critics, an endeavor I felt quite incapable of. Translator, traitor. Milan Kundera was not mistaken. Comes the day when you must own your work. And even though one is unable to write in a foreign language with the same precision as in one's mother tongue, and even though one runs the risk of being wobbly, of using the wrong word, it’s worth running the risk. Here a question arises : Where exactly is the text ? In the narration ? No. In the characters ? No. In the words ? No. The text is in the rhythm, the breathing, the emotion. The text has an essence, and words cannot translate it. The text mirrors the author's voice. Reading Andrew Riemer's translation, reading Julie Rose's later, brought me a lot of pleasure, but in these translations, I couldn’t hear my voice. Read Baudelaire in French and in English, and you’ll see you are reading two texts foreign to each other. Read Edgar Poe in French and in English, and you’ll understand that you are not dealing with the same person. How many people have learned German to capture Rilke’s spirit, or Russian to hear Dostoyevsky's voice ? The risk of giving up the comfort of my mother tongue had become a necessity. For five years, I went through a severe and frustrating treatment; I no longer read a single line of French. Cioran had thus conquered the French language with the help of many cigarettes and dictionaries. For five years, I mainly read English literature. I devoured everything from the most classic to the most contemporary. I particularly recorded and listened to English literature. English language is the one I speak every day, but speaking and writing are two different things. There was a rhythm and a suppleness specific to the English language I had to apprehend. A whole range of new vocabulary had to be acquired. The levels of language, the Aussie slang, the colloquialisms, I wanted to get them right. I relied more on my hearing than on my intellect then. Do not listen to those who denigrate English language and mock its supposed simplicity ! English is a complex, flexible, rhythmic language, which allows you to say a thousand things at once. Read Orlando, Virginia Woolf's tour de force, and you'll understand. Read Nightwood, Djuna Barnes’ baroque masterpiece, and you'll get an idea of what I am hinting at. Often, my frustration overrode the feeling of having to comply to cultural obligations, the old story of Babel and the confusion of languages. How inhuman to have scattered us in such a way! It didn't matter. After five years of writing seminars for the Writing and Research Society in UWS, I assume to be confident enough to draft The Lovers in English. I had never allowed myself to such freedom: divided into five acts, The Lovers is halfway between a novel and a play. The characters monologue in turn. I had the manuscript read and reread around me, reworked, redone, rewritten. I read the text aloud. And again, I reworked and rewrote. Xavier Hennekinne, who had just founded the Gazebo publishing house based in Sydney, agreed to publish me in 2018. He proofread and corrected my manuscript. The mistake one makes in a foreign language, orally as well as in writing, always shames. It wounds the self-esteem, it is a small scratch, but what is best ? A wounded self-esteem from which one will eventually recover, or to remain proudly barricaded in a language which encloses and isolates as a citadel ? This is what Gombrowicz did. Yet I understand. 

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Like any student in foreign language, I continue to learn. I have many notebooks filled to the brim with vocabulary. I switch from one language to another, translate my texts, sometimes write the first draft in French, sometimes in English. Andréï Makine says that he writes between two languages. Nothing is truer. To write in two languages is to live between two cultures. One shifts register, not by replacing one word with another in a mathematical way, but one moves from one culture to another, from one sensitivity to another. 

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I haven’t mentioned in this incomplete biography the various prizes, selections, etc. awarding my books. The awards are gratifying, of course, and I cannot thank enough the people who have encouraged my work, the journalists in Le Monde des livres, the radio journalists on France Culture and SBS radio, the French and Irish committee of literary awards, yet awards don’t lessen the painful, fundamental, relentless doubt which grips me each time I start writing a new text. As if I had to walk out of the grave again. As if I’d never learned anything. 