Talk:Gabriel Matzneff
Will return to write something short on Francesca Gee a bit later on. https://web.archive.org/web/20200402034934/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/world/europe/gabriel-matzneff-victim-france.html
I wouldn't mind finding out who this nameless and uncensored woman is: https://web.archive.org/web/20130326035244/http://matzneff.com/photos.php?une_famille=Amies&une_photo=4 . I will probably emphasize this photo in the article as it's a pretty good one and shows an intergen relationship (which may or may not have been sexual; i don't know at this point). Another photo is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130119232647/http://matzneff.com/photos.php?une_famille=Amies&une_photo=1 The caption says:
- "G.M. and the teenager who inspired the character of Allegra in Harrison Plaza"
Haven't found out much info about Harrison Plaza or the young woman...
We can do a gallery at the bottom and add some of these images. One could be this https://web.archive.org/web/20130326104136/http://matzneff.com/photos.php?une_famille=Amies&une_photo=5, with the caption reading:
- Marie-Agnès B., very present in Gabriel Matzneff's diaries - in particular in Mes amours décomposés, in Calamity Gab, in La prunelle de mes yeux, in Carnets noirs 2007-2008 and in Les Emiles de Gab la Rafale - and who inspired one of the poems of Super Flumina Babylonis and the character of Constance in Here come the Fiancé.
Interesting things...--Prue (talk) 17:23, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
- Notes to myself and others on Gee. To quote the 2020 article:
Encouraged by Mr. Matzneff, Ms. Gee had written him hundreds of amorous and sexually explicit letters during their three years together.
Some of them he published in 1974, without her authorization, in his fierce defense of pedophilia, “Les Moins de Seize Ans” (“Under 16 Years Old”). He was offering those letters, he wrote in another book, “Les Passions Schismatiques,” as evidence that “a relationship of love between an adult and a child could be for the latter extremely rich, and the source of a fullness of life.”
Ms. Gee said the words in the letters were those of a teenager manipulated by a man the age of her parents. Her letters were also used in “Ivre du vin perdu,” the novel whose cover featured an illustration of her.
“Now I consider they were extorted and used as a weapon against me,” Ms. Gee said. In her manuscript, Ms. Gee writes that “he used me to justify the sexual exploitation of children and teenagers.”
For years, Ms. Gee’s feelings about her experience with Mr. Matzneff were “muddied.” Then in the early 1990s, her understanding became clearer.
“It was only when I was almost 35 years old that I realized this wasn’t a love story,” Ms. Gee recalled. It was in 1992 that she contacted Mr. Matzneff, demanding that he stop using her letters and that he return them to her. Eventually, he sent her a photocopied stack — a carefully selected batch that excluded her negative correspondence. [Prue: Alleged negative correspondence... The claim is only provable by Matzneff unless Gee for some reason has her old, apparently negative letters, which she in theory wouldn’t since they were sent to Matzneff...]
A decade later, in 2002, it was Mr. Matzneff who wrote to her, asking, for the first time, her permission to use old photographs of her in a book. In the turquoise blue ink that he always used to pen his letters, Mr. Matzneff offered to identify the teenager as “the young girl who inspired the character of Angiolina in ‘Ivre du vin perdu.’”
Not only did Ms. Gee refuse, but she also demanded again that his books be purged of her letters and that her face be taken off the cover of “Ivre du vin perdu.”
Mr. Matzneff said that if Ms. Gee “called me tomorrow, I would be delighted to see her.”
The risque "full-throated" word-choice from another NY Times piece:
In 1974, Mr. Matzneff published a full-throated defense of pedophilia titled “Les Moins de Seize Ans” (“Under 16 Years Old”). The book made him famous in literary circles, earning him appearances on a famous literary television program, Apostrophes, and a regular column in Le Monde.--Prue (talk) 17:37, 2 July 2023 (UTC)