Minou and Me
Mind hunter
The Last Duel I’ve always wanted to be a writer of fiction. For me, there is no higher calling. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote a couple of beautiful children’s books and was instrumental in the creation of Babar the Elephant. My late sister, Florence, wrote novels of such typical Frenchness that she was compared to Francoise Sagan and could never find readers outside of Paris.
When I was a child in that city, the kids my age played cowboys and Indians and while they became small Gallic Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidys, I surreptitiously copied the poems of Minou Drouet and claimed them as my own.
You probably haven’t heard of the child poet, Minou Drouet.
In 1955, she astounded France—and a good part of Europe—by writing charmingly adult poems. A literary brouhaha followed. Was she real? How could she, at the tender age of six, write such moving lines? Were the verses penned by adults?
Charles Templeton, a CBS reporter, recalls: “Minou Drouet’s mother was a prostitute and her father a field hand. As an infant she was taken into the home of a middle-aged woman, whose ambition to write well exceeded her talents. She adopted the child and raised her with love, surrounding her with music in a home dedicated to literature. It appeared that Minou was retarded. At six she hadn’t spoken a word. The judgment of four doctors was that she would never be normal.
“One day, Minou’s adoptive mother played a recording of a Brahms symphony for her. Minou swooned. When she was revived, she spoke perfect French in complex sentences. Shortly thereafter she began to write poetry. Some of the poems were published and immediately provoked debate. It was said that no child of six could possibly have such thoughts, much less express them so profoundly. It was argued that, unlike music, poetry demands an experience of life, experience that no child so young could have had. It was charged that her adoptive mother—an aspiring poet herself who sought recognition but had been judged second-rate—was the author of the verses.
“The controversy became a cause célèbre. The French Academy of Arts and Sciences decided on an experiment to validate or to dismiss the claims made for the child. Minou was placed in a room behind one-way glass. She was provided with paper and pencil, and after she was alone and incommunicado, given three subjects to write about. She did as she was instructed, and the results were scrutinized. There could be no question; the poems were the product of a prodigious talent. Jean Cocteau, the eminent writer and film-maker, commented: ‘She’s not an eight-year-old child, she’s an eight-year-old dwarf.’”
I was about five years old when I copied some of Minou’s lesser poems in longhand onto my cahier d’ école and showed them to my mother who, herself an author, thought she too might have a genius on her hands. She called her friends, who called their friends. Could there be a male Minou in the Sagnier household?
In no time, things got out of hand and even at age six, I could see serious and dire consequences. I confessed the truth. It was possibly the hardest thing I ever had to do in my very brief life, and I decided there and then that, no matter what, whatever I wrote would be my own from then on.
It may have been a mistake to choose a writing career. According to surveys, the average income of a fiction writer—if you include the Internet folks and the superstars like Stephen King—is $512 a year. That’s not even fried-egg-sandwich money…
David Robins, author of The War of the Rats and many other compulsively readable novels, likes to say there are fewer fiction writers making a full-time living at their craft than there are professional football players in the game. So it’s a rarefied atmosphere. It’s also, I believe, the most fun a man who refuses to become an adult can have.
Fiction writing, I can tell you with great authority, is not for grown-ups. It is for people who refuse to accept the realities of life and prefer to create their own worlds, which anyone is welcome to visit. My experience is that for the most part, though many enjoy dropping by, few stay there long.
I love fiction. I am not, however, an informed writer. I never read writing magazines. I don’t subscribe to the New York Times Book Review. I frankly don’t give much of a hoot what a reviewer may think of a particular novel, and I generally distrust reviewers anyway. Up until a short time ago, I neither wrote nor read short stories, and I don’t spend a lot of time on the Internet looking at the fiction that’s there. In the pre-COVID past, I attended a couple of writers’ groups and hosted one in my home; I would recommend such gatherings to anyone interested in the craft.
I write fiction because creating and peopling my own worlds with characters I have brought to life is, by and large, more fun than dealing with the world I’m really in. When I finished writing my first novel, The IFO Report, my characters held a party for me. Now admittedly, I’d had a few drinks to celebrate the event, a not uncommon activity back then, but still, there they were, all the lead players of my opus, telling me exactly what they thought of me and my work, and how I could have done better by them.
I like the people I invent. After a while, they become my friends and, as any writer who has gone through the process will tell you, they take on a life of their own. You get to be a god, or a somewhat smaller version of deity. Can there be anything loftier and cooler than that?
I’ve had other careers. I worked for a United Nations agency more than a decade and was a counselor for several years. I wrote for newspapers, magazines, television and radio, and my stuff was published both here and overseas. All of it was interesting, and some of it was fascinating. I probably made more money in one year with the UN than in a decade of fiction writing.
It doesn’t matter. Fiction is my vocation.
The Last Duel I’ve always wanted to be a writer of fiction. For me, there is no higher calling. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote a couple of beautiful children’s books and was instrumental in the creation of Babar the Elephant. My late sister, Florence, wrote novels of such typical Frenchness that she was compared to Francoise Sagan and could never find readers outside of Paris.
When I was a child in that city, the kids my age played cowboys and Indians and while they became small Gallic Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidys, I surreptitiously copied the poems of Minou Drouet and claimed them as my own.
You probably haven’t heard of the child poet, Minou Drouet.
In 1955, she astounded France—and a good part of Europe—by writing charmingly adult poems. A literary brouhaha followed. Was she real? How could she, at the tender age of six, write such moving lines? Were the verses penned by adults?
Charles Templeton, a CBS reporter, recalls: “Minou Drouet’s mother was a prostitute and her father a field hand. As an infant she was taken into the home of a middle-aged woman, whose ambition to write well exceeded her talents. She adopted the child and raised her with love, surrounding her with music in a home dedicated to literature. It appeared that Minou was retarded. At six she hadn’t spoken a word. The judgment of four doctors was that she would never be normal.
“One day, Minou’s adoptive mother played a recording of a Brahms symphony for her. Minou swooned. When she was revived, she spoke perfect French in complex sentences. Shortly thereafter she began to write poetry. Some of the poems were published and immediately provoked debate. It was said that no child of six could possibly have such thoughts, much less express them so profoundly. It was argued that, unlike music, poetry demands an experience of life, experience that no child so young could have had. It was charged that her adoptive mother—an aspiring poet herself who sought recognition but had been judged second-rate—was the author of the verses.
“The controversy became a cause célèbre. The French Academy of Arts and Sciences decided on an experiment to validate or to dismiss the claims made for the child. Minou was placed in a room behind one-way glass. She was provided with paper and pencil, and after she was alone and incommunicado, given three subjects to write about. She did as she was instructed, and the results were scrutinized. There could be no question; the poems were the product of a prodigious talent. Jean Cocteau, the eminent writer and film-maker, commented: ‘She’s not an eight-year-old child, she’s an eight-year-old dwarf.’”
I was about five years old when I copied some of Minou’s lesser poems in longhand onto my cahier d’ école and showed them to my mother who, herself an author, thought she too might have a genius on her hands. She called her friends, who called their friends. Could there be a male Minou in the Sagnier household?
In no time, things got out of hand and even at age six, I could see serious and dire consequences. I confessed the truth. It was possibly the hardest thing I ever had to do in my very brief life, and I decided there and then that, no matter what, whatever I wrote would be my own from then on.
It may have been a mistake to choose a writing career. According to surveys, the average income of a fiction writer—if you include the Internet folks and the superstars like Stephen King—is $512 a year. That’s not even fried-egg-sandwich money…
David Robins, author of The War of the Rats and many other compulsively readable novels, likes to say there are fewer fiction writers making a full-time living at their craft than there are professional football players in the game. So it’s a rarefied atmosphere. It’s also, I believe, the most fun a man who refuses to become an adult can have.
Fiction writing, I can tell you with great authority, is not for grown-ups. It is for people who refuse to accept the realities of life and prefer to create their own worlds, which anyone is welcome to visit. My experience is that for the most part, though many enjoy dropping by, few stay there long.
I love fiction. I am not, however, an informed writer. I never read writing magazines. I don’t subscribe to the New York Times Book Review. I frankly don’t give much of a hoot what a reviewer may think of a particular novel, and I generally distrust reviewers anyway. Up until a short time ago, I neither wrote nor read short stories, and I don’t spend a lot of time on the Internet looking at the fiction that’s there. In the pre-COVID past, I attended a couple of writers’ groups and hosted one in my home; I would recommend such gatherings to anyone interested in the craft.
I write fiction because creating and peopling my own worlds with characters I have brought to life is, by and large, more fun than dealing with the world I’m really in. When I finished writing my first novel, The IFO Report, my characters held a party for me. Now admittedly, I’d had a few drinks to celebrate the event, a not uncommon activity back then, but still, there they were, all the lead players of my opus, telling me exactly what they thought of me and my work, and how I could have done better by them.
I like the people I invent. After a while, they become my friends and, as any writer who has gone through the process will tell you, they take on a life of their own. You get to be a god, or a somewhat smaller version of deity. Can there be anything loftier and cooler than that?
I’ve had other careers. I worked for a United Nations agency more than a decade and was a counselor for several years. I wrote for newspapers, magazines, television and radio, and my stuff was published both here and overseas. All of it was interesting, and some of it was fascinating. I probably made more money in one year with the UN than in a decade of fiction writing.
It doesn’t matter. Fiction is my vocation.
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