Remembrance of things past: An ode to Yves le Dantec and Brittany
(Juvenal Sanso mounts “Ode to Brittany: Paintings and Drawings” on view until Oct. 3 at the Alliance Total Gallery, at Alliance Française, during which he will also the receive the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres Award from the French government. He will also hold a lecture titled “Captivating Eyes” on Oct. 3, 7.30 pm, at Alliance Ondeo Auditorium. Entrance is free. There will also be a raffle of a Sanso artwork after the lecture. The show is dedicated to his friend and mentor, Yves le Dantec. Sanso spent 24 summers of his life, from 1958 to 1982, in the summer residence of Mr. le Dantec in Brittany. Le Dantec passed away in 1982. Sanso has not been to Brittany since.)
I met Yves le Dantec, my second father and mentor, in Paris in 1958. Yves le Dantec was the founder, manager and chief editor of France’s biggest newspaper, Ouest-France, published in Brittany (Rennes), with a daily circulation of at least a million. Soon after returning to France from many long months in German concentration camps during the war, he founded the newspaper in Brittany, which began as a small enterprise and which he developed into that giant that it was, and still is. Ouest-France has 25 different editions daily (if I remember right).
I, on the other hand, lived in Paris in my small dwelling as a young painter continuing my fine arts in Paris’ Ecole des Beaux-Arts with a fabulous $150 per month (P300) allowed by our Central Bank. My French was less than shaky and I hardly knew anyone besides my classmates.
But even if our residences were far apart, we happened to meet by the counter of a bistro near my place; both of us needed a cool drink, that simple! He overheard my “karabaw” French trying to order something from the bartender and he kindly helped me get what I wanted. Then and there we started a conversation that did not stop for 24 years. Life’s events helped develop a growing mutual appreciation and a very solid bonding and friendship that lasted till his demise in 1982.
In our first encounter in the bistro, I told him I was a painter, etc., and he told me that he would like very much to continue our conversation at his father-in-law’s place just a minute away. This he did, no doubt, knowing what a delightful shock I would get when I realized it was the studio-cum apartment of a master I idolized: Georges Roault!
I gasped. My wonderment was even greater when I soon learned that he was who he was and that he was married to the master’s daughter! Since we were neighbors in the city, we got to have a drink around the neighborhood and chat away with growing pleasure and personal esteem. Once, during a particularly hot summer, Yves asked me where I was spending the summer holidays. In short, I ended up going to the hotel he recommended on the Riviera where he would be with his family. His wife was absolutely delightful and the kids adopted me as I adopted them.
Despite this entwining of the parallels I think we might have seen ourselves less than we wished for the distance of our dwellings and difference in social strata might not have made things easy to combine and enrich. But there in that hotel on the Riviera, the kids got the measles and, thus, could not go to the Alps with the father for the yearly mountain climbing, the second summer activity. I was asked to accompany Yves to the Alps to set up the tents at the gorgeous mountains for the group of friends arriving very soon and, most particularly, for Yves not to be alone, totally alone, in that vast, dangerous and uninhabitable Nature. I did not know the first detail about mountain climbing, but their company was such a pleasure that I accepted. What followed were glorious days of nature like I had never seen and a very special bonding that came with the shared dangers of the alpinist sport with Yves.
I must have proven my courage and reliability for the other friends when they arrived they adopted me, too. Yves dazzled me constantly with his vast culture, enriched by the three major diplomas he had as a basis (from the Diplomat’s Institute, then a doctorate in law from Germany, and, also, a diploma for journalism). Finally, he elected to be in journalism because of his adventurous character. Listening to his stories, I savored the ferments of Europe in the ’30s and the ominous presence of Hitler’s flexing of his martial muscles.
He went to Berlin and with his perfect German he had all, and more than what was required to be a great correspondent for French-speaking presses around the world. Eventually Hitler stretched beyond the political to tackle aggressiveness, with the disastrous results we all know as the horrendous WWII.
As a reserve officer in the French Army he had to be commissioned and eventually was made prisoner by the Germans close to the Belgian border. Since he had escaped two or three times from the camps, he was put into more and more painful concentration camps. He would no doubt had been tortured and shot (if not gassed) if he did not possess the German language so thoroughly. Although he was not Jewish at all, he was at the end thrown in a camp for Jews and headstrong prisoners. He was spared the gas chamber, but not the humiliation, degradation and hardship.
This tragic chapter in his life, and my tragic chapter of the Japanese Occupation, made our bonding even more profound as we were able to reveal ourselves as it was impossible with others, warts and scars, unashamedly. This catharsis gave our relationship a depth hard to achieve in a normal living of life. I have never seen him shed tears at all with anyone else except with me.
These days of concentrated camaraderie on the Alps offered us a quiet contemplation of reality, in a most beautiful and gigantic series of mountains, with the interviewing of our devastating war experiences. His were lived as an adult while mine were that of a “child adolescent” — this, I think, made me a more pathetic witness for him which went to his heart. He also could unveil his own dark shadows and tunnels. It turned out to be our own fortress and secret confessional of the unutterable.
He never wrote about his years in the camps despite all he would have been given to parade his scars with a book; but he always refused despite the connections he had ready to jump on any description of what he told me. But his integrity would have suffered. I also recounted to him my own experience, right after Liberation, in an impoverished dispensary in Santa Ana. I was there to seek medication for my shell wounds, and next to me was a badly battered man, moaning out loudly. The attendants were extracting from his body small white bits of what seemed like bones — but they were not chips of bone, but teeth from another man’s face that had been blown up and impacted to him.
I could not have found a better door to the French at all levels of the cultural, artistic, societal and human factors than through my mentor, Yves. My eyes and ears were insatiable and Yves would share with me so much of what was joyful and enriching, and also what was painful. We liberated one another with our frankness and trust. I never relayed these despicable, dark elements of his war experiences to his wife, as he had requested me not to do so. I owe almost entirely to him my long stay in France for he knew how to envision the present and offer so much to my passionately curious nature.
I asked him to correct my French, both written and spoken, and he did so unfailingly, year after year. At least this was so in my first formative years of integration. I have always had a passion for mature minds, and he was a monument to the thinking mind.
What did I give in exchange for his kindness and sensitivity? When he died I did not know how to handle his loss, which happened in early 1982; I am still at a loss; I still have dreams, nightmares, where I see him in the street alive but I lose him in the crowds. Perhaps I gave a little back to him with my six languages when we traveled around the world. Aside from French and German, he did not speak anything else. He could have lived quite a lot longer if he had listened to his doctors who told him to go to the hospital for his heart, but because it was Christmas day, he wanted to be with the family; the next day he went to shower to go to the hospital but he never came out of the bathroom. To this day, I still miss my mentor, my friend, my second father — Yves.
