Mathieu Lindon was quick to write about his father, he only waited for the hour. She just rang. Twenty-one years after the death of Jérôme Lindon and six months after Gallimard took over Editions de Minuit, run by Irène Lindon, Mathieu’s sister, the author of “In childhood” therefore adds his own “ archive “. It’s his own way, very emotional, full of a “ intelligence » which he would like to have inherited, to portray an impenetrable man, who did not like the light, and to declare his love to him. Others, including researcher Anne Simonin, have documented the gesture of Editions de Minuit or hailed, such as Jean Echenoz and Jean-Philippe Toussaint, the publisher he was for them.
Mathieu Lindon and Hervé Guibert, two inseparable above Rome
Only Mathieu could tell of the father he was – Irène having always camouflaged herself behind the duty of reserve and André, third of the siblings, director of the aptly named animated film “The Invisible Child”, having sent a bottle of inked at his father’s head and definitively severed all ties with him, who suffered so much from not being able to know his grandchildren.
To have Jérôme Lindon as a father was to grow up under the weight of a mythology, born of the Resistance, and of a duty of insubordination, which the valiant little house prolonged until the end of the Algerian war, and even beyond. It was like living in an apartment with blown windows that the OAS had plasticized and where, later, anonymous telephone calls poured out night and day insults and threats against a Jewish editor who had taken up the cause of the Palestinians. Other fights, less violent, but no less decisive – it is to Jérôme Lindon that we owe the measure imposing in France the single price of the book, thanks to which literature and bookstores are still protected – punctuated the life of this lean activist with the appearance of a clergyman, of whom his son paints an intimate and tender portrait.
New novelists
Both kind and mean, stingy and generous, trusting and suspicious, sometimes fickle, but absolutely faithful to its authors – Beckett, alias Sam, primus inter pares –, union activist and visionary publisher, Jérôme Lindon was able to bring together, long after the New Novel, new novelists, whom he even wanted to bring together under the adjective “unmoved”, and which he made his second family. Like his father, the son knows how to marry seriousness and humor. We will see here Jacques Vergès bringing to Minuit a briefcase filled with 500-franc notes, Catherine Robbe-Grillet attending as SM mistress, her ” slave ” at her feet, at the funeral of her husband and Mathieu Lindon, tired of the attentions of Yann Andrea, Duras’ companion, advising her to commit suicide. The modest Jerome Lindon would probably not have published “An archive”, but he would have read it secretly and enjoyed it very much.
Editions de Minuit: “It is not a book publisher. It’s an author’s editor.An archiveby Mathieu Lindon, POL, 240 p., 19 euros.
