Henri-Pierre Roche

From Philosopedia

Henri-Pierre Roché (28 May 1879 – 9 April 1959)

Roché was a French author who was deeply involved in Paris with the artistic avant-garde and the Dada movement.

Born in Paris, France, he was an art dealer acquainted with artists such as Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Marie Vassilieff, Max Jacob, and Pablo Picasso. In 1905, he introduced Gertrude and her older brother Leo Stein to Picasso.

Leo Stein described Roché as

• a tall man with an inquiring eye under an inquisitive forehead, wanted to know something more about everything. He was a born liaison officer, who knew everybody and wanted everybody to know everybody else.

In Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, chapter 3, she described him similarly, remembering him for having read Three Lives and having recognized early her value as a writer.

Also, he was a friend of Francis Picabia, Constantin Brancusi, and Marcel Duchamp, with whom he traveled to New York city in 1916 following his discharge from the French army. With Duchamp and Beatrice Wood, he created the The Blind Man, a magazine known as a manifestation of the Dada art movement in the United States.

Noted for his womanizing, according to Times reporter Mary Blume, Roché who wrote Jules et Jim married twice:

Despite his constant womanizing and even a first marriage, Roche lived with his mother in the Arago apartment until she died when he was 50. "It is a terrible combination and like all terrible combinations it leads to something which was very strong in him," observes Stephane Hessel, the son of Roche's German friends Franz and Helen Hessel who became Roche's Jules and Kathe (Catherine in the film) while Roche was lanky French Jim.

Hessel, a retired ambassador, will attend the half-century celebration, as will Roche's son, Jean-Claude, 72, who works in bio-acoustics, recording birdsong and animal and insect sounds.

If Hessel, 85, has warm memories of Roche, with whom he spent more time from the ages of 3 to 15 than with his own father, Jean-Claude Roche's childhood was painful: "Even with my own children he could never hold one in his arms or on his lap. He was present intellectually but not affectively."

The son of Roche's second wife, whom Roche could not marry until his first wife (who had been his mistress since 1902) died in 1948, Jean-Claude said he came to "Jules et Jim" through the film. "After that I read the book. Perhaps my father had given me a copy, if so I've forgotten." A father who wants to remain a child is not perhaps the best father, he thinks, and he says it was only because of three years of psychoanalysis in his early twenties that he is still alive. It doesn't bother Jean-Claude Roche to have people dig into his life. "On the one hand I find it odd that people can appropriate it, make a career of it, but that's the way it is. I look at it without liking it, but without hating it either. I look at it the way I look at ants in an anthill."

Because Jules et Jim concerns two young men who are close friends and a woman who loves them both, Roché's wife Denise knew that

people have wondered how much was based on Roché, Marcel, and me. I cannot say what memories or episodes inspired Roché, but the characters bear only passing resemblance to those of us in real life!

His second major novel, also based on an episode of his life, was published in 1956 as Les deux anglaises et le continent. The French director François Truffaut befriended Roché and chose to adapt the story to film, which made the book a success.

Henri-Pierre Roché died in 1959 in Sèvres, Hauts-de-Seine.