Yvonne Baby died at age 90 overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday. In addition to being a writer, awarded the Interallié prize for her first novel, Yes, hope (Grasset, 1967), and a journalist who created the Culture department of the Monde, newspaper that she had to leave in 1986, she was a figure in the cultural world. She was born on August 18, 1931 and her mother remarried Georges Sadoul, the (communist) author of the monumental world history of cinema, so that the young Yvonne Baby soon met Louis Aragon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alberto Giacometti and Elsa Triolet. “It was an avant-garde social space where the girls couldn’t imagine living without having a job”, she said in 2014 to Ariane Chemin when the daily returned to its own history and evoked that day in 1971 when, after a good quarter of a century of male exclusivity, «the world appoints the first female head of department”.
“Chic, cultured, intimidating”
So this woman was Yvonne Baby, “chic, cultured, intimidating”, film critic at the newspaper, who was responsible for creating this Culture service which did not exist (Jacqueline Piatier directed the literary pages but these were only a department, they did not have the honor of be a service). Alongside big names in cultural journalism such as Michel Cournot and André Fermigier, she called on young people who were going to help her build the reputation of this new service, such as Claire Devarrieux (now a journalist at Release) and Hervé Guibert, who separated from Monde when the world separated from Yvonne Baby.
To evoke his tastes and his journalistic work, it is enough to give the list of Fifteen splendid men, according to the title of his collection of interviews for the newspaper (Gallimard, 2008). In alphabetical order: Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, Pierre Boulez, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Handke, Terrence Malick, Robert Motherwell, François Truffaut, Yves Saint Laurent, Orson Welles and Yohji Yamamoto. Besides that, she continued her own work.
“Inconsolable Hearts”
Here is what Release written by My Mother and the sky, very quickly (the Olivier, 1998): “Everything happens as if the death of the mother were an event too incredible for the linear narrative to suffice, as if only poetic energy could draw the contours of the enigma, define the limits of grief.” About the woman of the wall (Gallimard, 2004) : “A misfortune never ends well: it never ends. But it is a consolation to unite two inconsolable hearts. Inconsolable.” D’In midnight blue ink (Baker Street, 2014) : “She. This is how Yvonne Baby introduces herself, as she goes through, in the third person, her latest novel. That of her life, as she wished to tell it to her two sons, Nicolas and Olivier. Or, more recently, Nirvanah (Maurice Nadeau, 2016), a novel in which Clémence recounts herself for her granddaughter and who “should have been called Clemency because it is she, the central character, it is she whose life passes by, much stronger than the books”. In 1992, Olivier had published the true memoirs of Yvonne Baby, life found.