In Dinan, Roger Vercel gathered testimonies from which he drew powerful portraits.
Retrospective. Back to1930. Roger Vercel has been teaching and living in Dinan for a whole decade. It took him the time to put down on paper his recollection of a war where, as a simple soldier, he escorted an army that was still fully mobilized in spite of the armistice.
From this episode of the Great War, Roger Vercel drew the best out of his writings. A tale that will be adapted to the cinema in 1996 by Bertrand Tavernier under the original title 'Captain Conan'. Conan, a small Breton merchant, drawn from anonymity by his ability to kill and to whom the armistice leaves a dreadful taste of boredom and nostalgia. The book got the Prix Goncourt in 1934.
Undoubtedly Conan this barbarian cast a shadow over the rest of Roger Vercel's novels, peopled by peaceful characters facing not so much barbarity as their only vulnerability. It tells us about the time of schooners and dories, the great harvest in Newfoundland, the bisquines of Cancale and the captains of Cape Horn.
But contrary to a Stevenson or Mark Twain, Roger Vercel has no marine foot at all. In his writings, he did not glorify his own maritime adventures, but rather, in the style of Anatole Le Braz, he put on stage what the Newfoundland sailors that he met around a bistro table wanted to tell him. These sailors, Vercel interrogated them, observed them, wrote them down on hundreds of cards that he assembled in his novels as in a puzzle, walking and writing along the banks of the Rance river.
The master, coupled with an investigator on the prowl, in search of authenticity, truffles his stories with technical terms which, far from making them unfathomable, provided the reader with the feeling of being there.
Roger Vercel, the man of the waves