THE French writer and
journalist Pierre Daninos was the creator of one
of France’s most influential literary characters
of the last half-century, Major Thompson, the
archetype of the somewhat stiff, always correct
and well-mannered
Times-reading
Englishman in bowler hat and pinstriped trousers
with impeccable moustache and equally neat
umbrella.
Here was a Frenchman’s take on the mindset of
that most eccentric of beings: the retired army
officer from over the Channel, steeped in the
values of Empire and public schools, a close
cousin of the Colonel Blimps and other denizens
of Cheltenham villas or gentlemen’s clubs.
Except that this major was living in France
because of his marriage to a French woman. And
so, in Daninos’s Les Carnets du Major
Thompson (1954), we have a Frenchman
observing an Englishman observing the French.
Between entente
cordiale and misunderstanding, Daninos worked
this rich seam with humour that was finely
observed, sometimes acerbic but never
aggressive, and bequeathed a host of aphorisms
and observations: “A Frenchman without a
mistress is like an Englishman without a club”;
“The English taught the world table manners, but
the French eat.” In the 1950s and 1960s, Major
W. Marmaduke Thompson was to Englishness and
Franco-English relations what Bridget Jones is
to the modern singleton.
Like Bridget Jones, the Major began as a
newspaper serial, in this case for Le
Figaro, where Daninos was employed as a
chronicler. Not that it was his first book. In
1947, his Carnet du bon Dieu — the
“notebook” form was an ideal vehicle for
Daninos’s collection of observations — won the
Prix Interallié. Then, in 1952, he won the Prix
Courteline, for Sonia, les autres et moi,
following it in 1953 with another Sonia tome,
Comment vivre avec (ou sans) Sonia.
Born in 1913 into a bourgeois Parisian
family, Daninos studied at the respected lycée
Janson-de-Sailly. As a journalist, he tended to
the lighter side, writing a great deal about
golf — an eminently British sport in those days
— and tennis, his great passion.
Pressed into service in 1939, Daninos served
as a liaison officer between the French and
British forces in Flanders that were eventually
pushed back to Dunkirk. There he met the English
officer who, 15 years later, would provide him
with the model and mindset for Major Thompson.
“He helped me see France and the French in a
new way, and enabled me to write things I would
never have imagined without him,” Daninos said.
When the French Government capitulated in
1940, Daninos went to Rio de Janeiro, and
published his first novel, Le Sang des
hommes, simultaneouly there and in Lausanne.
His second, Méridiens, was published by
Julliard in 1945. Before fetching up at Le
Figaro, he wrote columns for
Vendredi, Paris-Soir and, finally,
Match.
Major Thompson was an instant hit. Translated
into 28 languages — one wonders how it was read
on the other side of the Iron Curtain — it went
on to sell two million copies in France alone
and was immediately taken up by Hollywood.
Unfortunately, a tired Preston Sturges was
not the man to save The French They Are a
Funny Race (1956) — a title which fully
reflects the film’s crudeness — from turkeydom.
Daninos produced a string of further Major
Thompson titles, from Le Secret du Major
Thompson (Major Thompson and I) to
Le Major Tricolore (Major Thompson
Goes French, 1968) and, finally, in 2000,
Les Derniers carnets de Major Thompson
(2000).
Always an amusing observer of social tics and
types, he also nailed the hyper-average
Frenchman with Un Certain Monsieur Blot
(1960), and explored the absurdities of modern
jargoneering in Le Jacassin (1962) and
snobbery in Snobissimo (1964). Tourists
and parvenus would be among his later targets.
Of course, one expects the humorist to have a
darker side, and Daninos revealed his frankly in
1966 with Le 36ème Dessous, an account of
depression and self-doubt in which the author
stands before us in confessional mode.
But just how integral the wit was to
Daninos’s make-up was demonstrated in 1967 when,
after a near-fatal car accident, he went into a
seven-day coma yet continued talking, as if
dictating his newspaper columns to some
imaginary secretary.
Daninos married Jane Marrain in 1942 and
Marie-Pierre Dourneau in 1968. He is also
survived by one son and two daughters from his
first marriage.
Pierre Daninos, writer and
journalist, was born on May 26, 1913. He died on
January 7, 2005, aged
91.
