Michel Butor: Text and Graphics

LEON S. ROUDIEZ

The vital statistics are simple. Michel Butor was born on
September 14, 1926, in a suburb of the northern French
industrial center of Lille; his father was a white-collar
employee of the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer du Nord, a private
railroad company that then served the area; there were seven
children (there would have been eight but a girl died before Michel
was born), two older sisters, four younger brothers and sisters.
Such facts, however, have little meaning in themselves.

As Butor told one of his many interviewers, Madeleine Santschi,
his father essentially was an artist. Whatever free time he had was
spent drawing, doing watercolors or woodcuts; he even showed the
latter at the Societe Nationale des Artistes Franjais. His friends
were also artists, and the young Michel learned a great deal from
them. Furthermore, both his mother and grandmother played the
piano; so did his sisters and soon he, too, started to take lessons.
The sound of the violin appealed to him more, perhaps on account
of a sentimental, romantic disposition; hearing that instrument, he
recalls, drew tears from his eyes. His parents apparently indulged
his wishes, and he began playing on a small violin at age seven.
Eventually he was allowed to play on the full-size family violin that
the grandfather of one of his grandmothers brought back from
Vienna at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was told
that it had been selected by Karl Maria von Weber for that
ancestor, who played chamber music in a group Weber was
interested in. While Michel Butor never excelled at violin playing
and had to abandon practice when university studies preempted his
time, this experience cleariy sensitized his ear for music in addition
to making him learn its rudiments. Thus music and art provided a
more significant ambiance than railroad operations in his family
life. Thirty years after he had to give up the violin his youngest
daughter began to play and he picked it up again so he could