A Burgundian at heart, Fred Bernard has written ‘Nos héritages’, the story of our evolution – including his own – as told to his son. A comic strip as whirling as it is touching this Athenaeum regular will present on 14 June.
In 30 years, you’ve produced nearly 80 comic strips, children’s books and essays, including two on wine…
Yes, ‘Les raisins de l’extrême… entre Condrieu et Côte-Rôtie’ in 2020, with Yves Gangloff, Yves Cuilleron and Julien Pilon. I was struck by the particularly steep slopes of this wine-growing region. On the spot, I realised that, for exactly the same surface area as my friend Caroline Chenu, of the eponymous domaine in Savigny-lès-Beaune, the winegrower took twice as long to prune and harvest… Hence the title. Earlier, in 2013, I published ‘Chroniques de la vigne: conversations avec mon grand-père’. A collection of all the anecdotes he told non-stop: his memories as a young crémant producer for Parigot & Richard, the family estate, the Occupation, the way he looked at our world…
Transmission is THE subject of ‘Nos héritages’. How did this project come about?
I owe it to our son, Melvil. He was 8 years old when he started asking me essential questions: ‘What’s the point of life, given that everyone dies in the end?’, ‘Who invented gods?’, ’How do we grow up?’. Two years later, I started trying to answer them in my own way. I wanted to reassure him about the state of the world, to explain to him that not everything is doomed…
One of the distinctive features of this book is the way it is divided up: 10 chapters in which the great periods of humanity and the different stages of your life are interwoven, to the point where you are depicted wearing a beast’s skin during ‘your’ prehistory or a toga during ‘your’ Antiquity. Why this parallel?
Obviously, it adds a bit of humour. Beyond that, these similarities make sense: leaving prehistory to enter antiquity, when I was in first grade and learning to read and write; connecting with the Middle Ages, when I was working in masonry with my grandfather, my father and my brother, on churches, manor houses, chapels… We’re all part of the big story with our own little stories.
Yours is full of stories. The book is teeming with anecdotes… Have you sorted them out? How did you go about it?
I don’t think I’ve experienced more than anyone else. Perhaps I have an easier time remembering. It’s a family atavism: my grandfathers, my father… used to tell me everything, over and over again. So I’m far from having put everything into this book. Of course I made a selection! A drastic one, in fact! With the help of my two editors, we retained only the ‘very substance’, taking care to have enough material to alternate tensions and pauses, actions and feelings… Once this work was done, I launched into more in-depth writing, then into drawing. But it wasn’t all done in one go. Far from it. It was too dense. At the same time, other projects allowed me to step back and see things more clearly. It took me 5 years to unfold all these stories. This is the most complicated book I’ve ever worked on.
Did you have any restraint? Dealing with particularly intimate episodes in your life or the need to reach a wider audience than just your tribe?
Not really, no. Our son Melvil knows everything about me. After all, we’ve been seeing each other for over 15 years… For the more personal questions, I asked the people concerned for their permission to talk about them. As for the rest, I trusted my publishers completely. They told me to give it my all and the first feedback has been pretty good. I think every reader can relate to a particular moment in the book. We may not all have the same life, but we all live in the same world. Most of the children around us are asking themselves the same essential questions as Melvil…
How did he react to ‘Nos héritages’?
He’s waiting until the end of school to read it in full. So far, he’s only skimmed bits and pieces. I’m sure he’ll be moved, but he won’t be surprised, apart from the way it’s all told and organised. As I said, he and I know each other well.
What are you working on?
With Marie Desplechin on the script, I’m illustrating an album about the life of Simone Veil and her sisters. She had the ingenious idea of using everything they said or wrote. Hardly a sentence is invented. This three-part story will be published in September by Les Arènes. It’s another book about transmission. Another little story within the big one…