The Lyrical Literature of Distant Listening

© 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press

Distant listening—a practice born with radio amateurism, known as DXing among American radio enthusiasts—was the term used to designate an essential dimension of radio during the interwar period: the capacity to listen to radio stations far away.[1] What this involved was not just the fine-tuning of a wireless set, but educated guesses about foreign identification signals, languages and speech patterns, and frequent battles against unwanted noise and distortions. As the British radio pioneer Peter Eckersley recalled in his memoirs, for the fleeting thrill of capturing a foreign broadcast one had to endure, in the early years at least, “long periods of virtual rigor mortis waiting for [an] identification signal” and much parasitic noise: “the wailing and the grunting, the shrieking and the crying,” the “bangs, crackles, hums, whistles,” and “the portentous booming” and “howling noise” carried by the airwaves.[2] As Simon Potter observes, when we speak about radio, we assume a good degree of intelligibility, but the reality of distant listening consistently involved large amounts of “unwanted, excessive, aberrant” noise and incomprehensible content.[3] What could be heard from distant locations largely depended on atmospheric conditions and other uncontrollable factors. Interferences between transmitters, between the frequencies used by radio stations, and between wireless sets and nearby machines as innocuous as trams, neon signs, or refrigerators remained common (Potter, Wireless Internationalism, 65).

More is known about distant listening in relation to British broadcasting than in other contexts thanks to Potter’s work on the “wireless internationalism” that emerged within and around the BBC during the 1920s and 1930s. Through the BBC magazine World-Radio (whose longest-standing columns discussed tuning strategies and specialized in providing assistance to listeners wanting to identify distant radio stations), Potter traces the emergence of a particular kind of internationalism—elastic, sometimes unsteady, often wary, always tinged with hope.[4] Distant listening, Potter shows, shaped the emergence of powerful worldviews around peacekeeping, the threat of another world war, and the preservation of empires, which manifested themselves in different arenas, including the BBC’s development of Empire broadcasting and initiatives taken by the International Broadcasting Union and the League of Nations.

This article focuses on a type of literary discourse associated with distant listening and the contexts in which it emerged, rather than the practice itself. As such, it moves away from matters pertaining to programming decisions, institutional decision-making, and historic modes of listening explored elsewhere in scholarship on the period. I focus on a significant body of journalistic essays and poetry that represents some of the hopes and anxieties tied to distant listening in France in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In this context, related to that which Potter has scrutinized, distant listening was called écoute lointaine, and less frequently écoute à distance or écoute étrangère. Radio journalism was abundant and interferences were troublesome, owing to the idiosyncratic architecture of the French broadcasting system and wavelength allocations.[5] The rhetoric around the distant listener, known as chasseur d’ondes (hunter of soundwaves), celebrated the journeys made possible by radio, the ability to “[traverse] an entire sonorous landscape that is ghostly, yet as evocative and precise as an embossed map,” as Emile Vuillermoz put it in 1924.[6] Here, I contextualize then discuss radio-related writings by three authors hazily remembered today for whom distant listening became a tremendously generative practice and an artistic theme in its own right: Fernand Divoire (1883–1951), a Belgian-French writer and journalist deeply dedicated to radio drama and interested in occultism, dance, and radio; Pierre Mac Orlan (Pierre Dumarchey, 1882–1970), a French writer and journalist who wrote noted texts about distant listening and numerous radio talks; and the French poet Suzanne Malard (1907–1982), who became a celebrated radio dramatist and specialized in poetry about radio, giving the lie to the widely-held belief that distant listening was overwhelmingly a pastime for men.[7] I trace common threads in the journalistic essays that these three writers produced for French newspapers and magazines, and in other texts focused on distant listening such as Mac Orlan’s fiction, which frequently evokes radio waves, and Malard’s poetry, which celebrates the technology of broadcasting. Their musings about radio had a distinctive context: a vast, often literary radio journalism expressing competing visions of modernity, nourished by a striving toward cosmopolitanism, a strong sense of nationhood, and the growth of radio’s “listening public” and “communities of the air” (to borrow Kate Lacey’s and Susan Merrill Squier’s iconic terms), which were as politically conflicted in a Francophone context as they were elsewhere.[8] Divoire, Mac Orlan, and Malard had much in common beyond their interest in distant listening—they were all interested in the practicalities of broadcasting and studio work, they worked in the same milieu, and their networks often overlapped. The printed press with which they were associated was located firmly on the right and displayed different nationalist, monarchist, conservative, authoritarian, and sometimes fascistic affiliations. Their own affiliations, also located firmly on the right, were sometimes loose, and sometimes determinative for their later careers, as I go on to show here.

As Rebecca Scales argues in her study of French broadcasting, Divoire’s, Malard’s, and Mac Orlan’s abilities to articulate prevalent technological and institutional concerns and enthusiasms are precisely what makes their radio-related writings stand out.[9] They all had distinctive careers, but what brings them together is the precision with which they captured the fascination with distant listening prevalent in the interwar period. Divoire, notably, celebrated radio in pomp in his column for Carlos Larronde’s short-lived magazine Lumière et Radio.[10] Listening means contact with “something of the soul of those who live . . . beyond the mountains, the forests, and the seas,” he declared enthusiastically.[11] “Can you hear, from Amsterdam, this concert in which a gentleman sings so well in French, his voice traveling across thick grey clouds, reaching my home as well as yours?” he asked. “Can you hear, from Poland, the midnight mass and these bells ringing?” (Divoire, “En écoutant . . . La TSF est poésie,” 5). When it came to radio, Divoire saw poetry everywhere, particularly in interferences: that world he called “the zone of the storms” stimulated the imagination like nothing else could.[12] “Imagine. Is that not the great pleasure gifted to us by the wireless?” he wondered, describing epic journeys through a chaos of soundwaves “below Hilversum,” where a “volley of demons” or perhaps “the most improbable birds” hiss and scream, generating noises that are “less expected, less familiar than the music created by composers” (Divoire, “En écoutant . . . La Zone,” 4). Like Divoire’s columns, Malard’s and Mac Orlan’s writings seem devoid of intent beyond transcribing the experience and feelings spurred by hearing voices and sounds from distant places. Yet, other concerns loom large as I demonstrate in the second half of this article, building on Scales’s observations, and drawing on the wide range of radio-themed texts that these writers produced between 1927 and 1931. I show that their distinct lyricism has a political valency that is more subtle than appears at first sight, fueled by wider fears about national sovereignty, rearmament, and appeasement, and by a mixture of emotions around radio’s effectiveness as a tool of propaganda as well as social cohesion. To Divoire, Malard, and Mac Orlan, along with the right’s new pacifists who watched with fascination and disquiet the rise of Mussolini, then Hitler, radio did not simply offer a repository of lyrical images that could be redeployed at will: it gave a focus to their hopes for a new nationalism, one that could reinforce Francophile sentiment and preserve France from the threats posed by Italy, Germany, and precarious European alliances. I conclude by discussing how their concerns about radio resonate with their respective wartime trajectories and decisions.

The grandiloquence we see in Divoire’s radio journalism remained common, well into the 1930s, particularly among French pioneers who felt equally at ease writing and working in studios. Radio, for Pierre Descaves, remained a “quasi-miraculous” invention: “One word goes through the microphone, and it immediately encircles the globe.”[13] “By turning a dial, any one of us can travel, unseen, anywhere,” Carlos Larronde affirmed. “Yet. . . . It is the world that comes to us. . . . The universe fits between four walls.”[14] At this stage—before distant listening became the act of political defiance it turned into in Nazi Germany, in wartime France, or elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe—the ability to listen to music and voices emanating from far away was widely perceived as a sign that major civilizational problems could be resolved and old hatreds could be pacified.

Across Europe, radio stations advertised their openness to the continent by organizing special broadcasts, relaying foreign programs and music, or issuing calls and announcements in different languages: identification tables from 1928, for example, indicate that English, French, and German—the languages of the leading radio powers—were used for announcements and closing calls by stations including Bratislava, Budapest, Hilversum, Prague, Warsaw, San Sebastián, and Stamboul.[15] Distant listening was also embedded in the language of advertising. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, brands including Bush, Igranic, Siemens, Sonora, Nora, Ram, and Telefunken disseminated publicity extolling its pleasures in simple graphic styles, associating world maps with the physical shape of wireless sets and the imagined trajectory of soundwaves. More discursive advertising, frequent in the Anglophone radio press, represented distant listening as the most rewarding form of travel available. “Go globe-trotting in your armchair,” urged the British make RAP in World-Radio in 1935, rendering the distant listener as a “master of space, conqueror of distance,” only needing to “[tap] the ether” to hear any music imaginable.[16] By that point, wireless sets were more powerful and listening to foreign stations no longer required technical competence, as some veteran radio journalists noted that year. Jay Coote, one of World-Radio’s old-timers, admitted missing the excitement that came from capturing signals on a crystal set from “some little one-horse station in the South of France, or some other fairly distant locality in Europe,” and the French journalist Georges-Armand Masson fondly recalled his heroic handiwork as chasseur d’ondes and the burnt rubber smells that once invaded his home.[17] Vuillermoz had no nostalgia but praised the higher class of listeners who had the wisdom to focus on what they could hear—unlike the chasseur d’ondes, devoid of critical sense, only keen to “strike down distant and unexpected prey.”[18]

The representations of distant listening produced by Divoire, Malard, and Mac Orlan during the late 1920s and the early 1930s are on the threshold between these different ways of apprehending radio: as a miracle, still, but one that has lost some of its shine. On the surface, their texts sit awkwardly with the wider modernist corpus concerned with technology; there is nothing typographically and formally adventurous about them. We can trace a more experimental persuasion through writers such as Guillermo de Torre, who summoned an “INTERPLANETARY RAILROAD” linking “MADRID PARIS NEW YORK ZURICH MOSCOW DADA STATION EIFFEL TOWER POLAR WHARF”; Ivan Goll, who invoked an “[i]nterplanetary acoustics” relaying the music and news of the world and bringing European poets together; or the Mexican Stridentist Kyn Taniya, who let wireless transmission shape the form and the content of his poetry in Radio: Poema inalámbrico en trece mensajes (Radio: Wireless Poem in Thirteen Messages, 1924).[19] Wireless transmission is here associated with a language both disintegrating and reforming itself, but a marked ambivalence about the virtues of distant listening also remains. Taniya’s “Midnight Frolic” describes “an insupportable confusion of terrestrial voices / and of strange voices / faraway,” as “[g]usts of electric air whistle / in the ears.”[20] “. . . IU IIIUUU IU . . .” mimics the labor involved in tuning a wireless set and making sense of fragments of news bulletins, literary talks, and educational programs. The poem eventually stabilizes in a stanza announcing that anyone can purchase “electric ears” for less than a dollar to “fish for the sounds that sway / in the kilometric hammock of the airwaves” (Taniya, Radio, 29). Using a different, resolutely celebratory mode, Vladimir Mayakovsky portrayed radio as a tool for communist revolution, describing a new political solidarity sweeping the globe along with radio’s soundwaves.[21] His renowned poem “Radio-Agitator” envisions a future in which “[a] worker / of America and a worker of Chukhloma / will join their voices / in a single chorus. / So that the ages without chains / pass / more quickly.”[22] Similarly, “Happiness of the Arts” extols radio’s capacity to resuscitate Alexander Pushkin, Modest Mussorgsky, and Alexander Herzen for the benefit of listeners anywhere from Brazil to Spain through to the circumpolar regions.[23]

It is tempting to assume—in light of Mayakovsky’s poetry, for example—that unequivocal celebrations of distant listening remained the preserve of internationalists eager to express communist or socialist commitments. But the transnationalism of radio was never simple: as Allen S. Weiss reminds us, “[r]adiophony is a heterogeneous domain, on the level of its apparatus, its practice, its forms, and its utopias,” a statement that qualifies radio’s early history in France particularly well.[24] Before the advent of the Popular Front and magazines such as Radio-Liberté, the French left counted few dedicated radio journalists beyond Augustin Habaru, best defined as an anti-dogmatic communist. Discussions of radio, as with other realms of public life, remained dominated by right-leaning publications such as L’Intransigeant, a newspaper with which Mac Orlan and Divoire were affiliated (the former as journalist, the latter as journalist, editor, then editor-in-chief).[25] L’Intransigeant became renowned for its adventurous radio journalism and for sponsoring experiments in reportage and broadcasting. More generally, the relation between the internationalism of a publication and its dissemination of foreign radio listings was not always predictable. The clearest example is the French communist daily L’Humanité, which divided the world into “the red waves” and “the capitalist waves” and published the briefest of radio programs. In contrast, Radiocorriere, the magazine that defined Italian radio under Mussolini, featured information about a plethora of foreign programs every week; the long-standing interest in foreign broadcasting prominent in the fascist radio press became an asset during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War and thereafter, with Italian stations developing the capacity to broadcast anti-French and anti-British propaganda in many languages.[26] As for World-Radio, the BBC’s “official foreign and technical journal,” its programs remained heavily redacted and prioritized music over spoken word to make foreign offerings seem intelligible to as many Anglophone listeners as possible. The challenges of distant listening were chronicled in a dispassionate, observational tone, the focus remaining on signal strength and the likelihood of capturing a decent signal from Western and Central Europe. Lyricism, if any pierced through, was incidental, never beyond what a weather forecast might offer.

While magazines such as World-Radio promoted genteel, rational, functional forms of distant listening and discouraged “radio fishing” (wandering through the airwaves for the sake of it), the thrill of the chase remained a topic of predilection for Divoire, Malard, and Mac Orlan.[27] Vocabularies of hunting, conquest, and capitulation dominate. In the first instalment of his column for Lumière et Radio, Divoire compared the distant listener to “an insatiable Don Juan” and staged a male radio fan moving from the national basics—large stations such as Radio Tour Eiffel, Radio-Paris, and Radio PTT—to foreign challenges (Daventry, German radio stations, then Bratislava, Prague, Brno, and Moravska-Ostrava), then radio stations in Spain and Italy, then unknown stations further afield. There is no end in sight for this listener who remains at the mercy of every new wavelength allocation plan. “The unknown station,” Divoire concludes, “will always be there. And when Don Juan is finally on the cusp of picking it up, a new Prague Plan will burst his sky open. And everything will start anew, once again.”[28] Here as elsewhere in Divoire’s journalism, as in Mac Orlan’s essays about radio and Malard’s radio poetry, what matters uppermost is the occurrence of the broadcast, the emotions ignited by its transmission transforming content into a matter of secondary importance. In their own, often literal ways, these representations of distant listening grapple with the phenomenon Robert Ryder evocatively describes, in another context, as the “acoustical unconscious” of the 1930s. This acoustical unconscious, tied to “necessary foreign entities that . . . ‘speak’ to us in a way that we could not otherwise imagine or represent, that catches us off-guard, but that nevertheless tell us something fundamental about ourselves,” emerges just as “meanings and identifiable voices give way to sounds and phonemes.”[29]

In modernist literary studies, scholars of interwar radio have paid close attention to Ezra Pound’s radio operas, F. T. Marinetti’s radio pieces and related Futurist manifestos, and BBC programs by prominent writers including Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and E. M. Forster. Many of these scripts have been published, as well as other illuminating sources including radio plays, stories, and talks by Walter Benjamin and documents relating to Robert Desnos’s advertising work and radio experiments.[30] Overall, however, little attention has been paid to the lesser-known writers for whom radio was an artistic lifeline; the jobbing, sometimes aspirational, sometimes struggling writers who fed the broadcasting machine. In a French context, the gap is very noticeable: indeed, much of French radio was built by minor and forgotten writers, with the studios remaining the domain of “members of the trade,” as Hélène Eck identifies them.[31]

Divoire, Malard, and Mac Orlan are best described as in-betweeners, in that they moved between the world of literary writing and the radio studio. They mastered the art of writing for the microphone early on, while also developing a profound interest in writing about radio. The expressive potential of interferences ranks high in their essays, as does a preoccupation with radio’s evanescence and ability to cross borders. This is a literature that thrives on expressions of wonder and bewilderment, as well as fear. Its lyricism is always vivid, often pleasant, always evocative, yet it revolves around technical themes and features such as antennas, wavelengths, dials, or parasitic noise. As such, it offers an interesting counterpart to the “curious form of technological fetishism” that Rubén Gallo has diagnosed in modernist literature purporting to be “about” the wireless: in poetry volumes such as Joan Salvat-Papasseit’s Poemes en ondes hertzianes (Poems in Hertzian Waves, 1919) and Jaroslav Seifert’s Na vlnách TSF (On the Waves of TSF, 1925), Gallo argues that wireless transmission never becomes the true subject.[32] Indeed, thoughts and sounds drift in and out as part of a creative process for which radio simply provides an analogy. There is much greater literalism and less professed amateurism in the writings about radio that I discuss further on. Divoire’s, Malard’s, and Mac Orlan’s lyricism is of a different order, factually bound to distant listening as a process whereby the individual as well as the collective—sometimes the imperial nation, sometimes the polity in a more abstract sense—can be unmade and remade.

Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us of the complexity of listening as a social act: listening can equate a “withdrawal and turning inward,” but also functions as “a reality . . . indissociably ‘mine’ and ‘other,’ ‘singular’ and ‘plural,’ as much as it is ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ and ‘signifying’ and ‘a-signifying.’”[33] We see such tensions at work in representations of distant listening, which envisage social ties in mystical terms and the French nation as an irreducible essence. Divoire’s journalism for Lumière et Radio, Malard’s poems, and Mac Orlan’s essays and fiction offer an interesting example of a socially conservative literature trapped between the competing political agendas dominating public radio at this crucial stage in its development, as a tool able to promote cross-cultural understanding and cooperation, and as a tool able to embed nationalism into everyday thinking more rapidly and effectively than any other medium.[34] Their representations of broadcasting remain haunted by a mistrust of other cultures and nations, while occasionally and sometimes begrudgingly gesturing towards cross-cultural understanding. Such a perspective on radio’s seeming universalism and geopolitical significance, in turn, aligns with its historic role as a “tool of empire,” seen as capable of safeguarding European colonial power in large parts of Asia and Africa.[35] In the auditory culture of the French empire, for which a dedicated Poste Colonial was created in 1931, these were live questions tied to profound anxieties surrounding the decline of France’s imperial project and to growing political and social polarization in the North African colonies, as Scales and Arthur Asseraf have demonstrated.[36]

The future of radio, for Malard and Divoire, lay in radio drama, a realm dominated by discussions of aesthetics, often insulated from divisive geopolitical questions on the surface. Both campaigned for the recognition of radiogenic forms in their broadcasts and radio journalism, and at public events such as the 1937 and 1939 Congresses of Radiophonic Art in Paris, organized by the radio pioneer Gabriel Germinet.[37] Some of the talks Divoire occasionally gave on Radio-Paris pertained to the particularities of radio drama. He wrote many radio plays, the most striking of which include Marathon (an adaptation of one of his stage plays) and Les Voix amies et ennemies, first broadcast on Radio-Paris in 1931 and 1934 respectively. His prior career as a poet, notably within the Simultaneist movement, had led him to experiment with sound poetry; his simultaneous poem “Naissance du poème” (Birth of the Poem), an experiment from 1918, was widely celebrated and became a mass-produced gramophone record. His core activity, however, was journalism. He worked for sustained periods of time for L’Intransigeant, as critic, editor, and, from 1924, editor-in-chief, while also writing reviews and essays for other magazines—notably those affiliated with the fascistic far right such as Gringoire and the nationalist right such as La Revue de France. In 1933, he left L’Intransigeant and worked for publications including Le Temps, Le Rempart, Noir et Blanc, and La Presse, which encompassed a broad spectrum of positions across the French right.[38] Le Rempart, a short-lived polemical daily for which Maurice Blanchot acted as editor-in-chief, was characterized by its fierce nationalism and its anti-Hitlerian, anti-internationalist, and anti-Communist stance.[39] Noir et Blanc, directed by Roland Dorgelès and Pierre Benoit, was more conventional in its conservatism; its founder, the publisher Albin Michel, initially wanted it to focus on literary talent.[40]

Like Divoire, Malard belonged to the small circle of authors who congregated around organizations such as the Union d’Art Radiophonique, of which she became Deputy Secretary. She contributed innovative proposals for international radio archives, experimental broadcasts and the dissemination of radio drama to the 1937 Congress of Radiophonic Art.[41] She never enjoyed the same level of public exposure as Divoire and Mac Orlan, but was a celebrated dramatist, the darling of the Catholic right.[42] The plays she wrote with her mother Cita Malard (Zoé Vandaele, 1884–1952) remained deeply anchored in their Catholic faith and often experimented with form. Notably, Le Dieu vivant: Radio-reportage de la Passion en 4 journées was styled as a documentary and retold the Passion of Christ through the perspective of a reporter sent to Jerusalem. The play, broadcast by Paris-PTT for Easter 1937, remained their best-known work; it was widely translated, frequently revived, and broadcast by radio stations far and wide in Europe and on the American continent. Malard gave talks on Radio-Paris in 1932, 1935, and 1936, largely on poetry and radio, and in 1949 she presented religious programs on Catholicism and art with her mother on RMC Monte Carlo. She published three essays about radio and wrote journalism on various matters, from the lives of Catholic saints to Prince Rainier’s enthronement, in the Catholic newspaper La Croix notably. Her enthusiasm for technology extended to television; in 1937, the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris featured television performances of two of her plays.[43]

A gulf separates the radio journalism that I discuss below from that of internationalists like Paul Dermée, one of the most prolific radio journalists of the period.[44] Dermée (whose true vocation was avant-garde poetry, within Dadaist circles and beyond) campaigned for a radio that celebrated tolerance and pan-European understanding; he issued regular calls for better organization of the airwaves on the grounds that “international listening” could “contribute to giving everyone a sense of Europe, the great homeland of which each of our nations is just a province.”[45] While Divoire and Malard in particular paid lip service to some of these ideals, their visions of radio are frequently punctured by an underlying belief that nations and cultures can at best observe one another from a distance. In their writings as in Mac Orlan’s, radio thrives on distance and inhabits space in ways that are ambivalent, mysterious, and often threatening. Divoire wrote repeatedly about radio’s capacity to extend his horizons, going so far as asserting that “[t]he wireless is communion within humanity” (“En écoutant . . . La TSF est poésie,” 5). Yet his column for Lumière et Radio shows that he had reservations about the “minutes of international sympathy” that radio could engineer, and fundamentally believed that distant listening was tantamount to a search for “national character,” a way of discovering the true, visceral meaning of one’s national attachments.[46] Malard’s many radio-themed poems also celebrate distant listening as a visceral practice to do with configuring one’s place in the world and asserting the superiority of French culture. As for Mac Orlan, he saw radio as a force that invaded everything, including the air he breathed and the sky under which he walked, and his depictions of broadcasting waver between celebrations of a technological miracle and dark portrayals of invasion.

An essay from 1928 detailing Mac Orlan’s conception of a “literature of imagination” brings these anxieties in a clearer frame. The essay—loose personal recollections interwoven with comments about technology and industrialization—begins by asserting that shortwave radio is where “the elements of the social fantastic of our time circulate and are captured.”[47] It ends with a reflection about the future of Europe, with Mac Orlan speculating that, in 1938 specifically, a war “even more integral than the one we have just suffered” may erupt (Sélections, 83–84). Owing to the geopolitical force of Russia and Italy—“the two poles of absolute chauvinism”—war could become inevitable, he suggests, but could result in a cohesive polity, “a United States of European nations”: “A European patriotism will arise, which will act as a call to arms for men willing to serve the general interest, and there will also be a sentimental patriotism, the love of one’s native province. These provinces will be called France, Germany, England, Spain, Italy, etc” (84, 85). In conclusion, he celebrates France’s superiority as “the only nation in the world that knows how to use freedom without yielding to stupid excesses” (87–98). Here as in the reportage that established his reputation as a journalist, Mac Orlan’s views are inflected by the same ambivalent interest in authoritarianism that divided the Germanophobic right. He depicted Hitler’s rise as the result of specific economic and political circumstances. In 1932, in his celebrated reportage from Berlin for Paris-Soir on the elections opposing Hitler to Hindenburg, he focused on the terrible deprivation crushing many Berliners. In a preface to a book on Hitler—which concluded that war was the most likely outcome—he drew attention again to how Hitler had thrived on deep poverty in Germany, portraying him as “the product of the misery of the people” and a manifestation of “hunger and ruin.”[48] In contrast, he made his fascination for Mussolini’s personality evident; he was one of Mussolini’s first interviewers when he worked for L’Intransigeant and portrayed him as noble and sensitive.[49] Later, he made his admiration for Franco and the Spanish Legion commander José Millán-Astray known and defended Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia publicly, signing a manifesto endorsed, as Herbert Lottman argues, by well-known fascists, supporters of Charles Maurras’s ultra-nationalist movement Action Française, and conservatives with looser affiliations, mostly issued from the Catholic elite.[50] In the mish-mash of Mac Orlan’s interests a thread nonetheless emerges: a terrible sense of foreboding that can only be allayed by displays of national strength.

The figure of the chasseur d’ondes seems to have fascinated Mac Orlan, and his portrayals of distant listening reflect the flitting between lavish praise and deep dread that generally dominates his evocations of radio. “All kinds of music on earth are offered to us, all countries, all languages are ours,” he exclaimed in an interview from 1938. “The wireless is the book; it is the theatre; it is the concert . . . !”[51] In the same breath, he confessed to loving radio with a deep disquiet, on account of the “pleasant, imperceptible, undetectable intoxication” that it brings (Mac Orlan, “Le Miracle,” 92). Here as elsewhere, his writing associates radio with an all-pervasive otherworld and with the dark side of the fantastic—a notion that he theorized as “fantastique social” (social fantastic), which often acted as shorthand for a sense that terrible historical catastrophes were about to arise and threatened to bring French civilization to ruin.[52] In an essay from 1926 describing a nighttime walk across Paris, he portrayed the Eiffel Tower, the symbolic heart of French radio, as the center of “the crackling mystery of the soundwaves that cross space carrying all the words that have been entrusted to it.”[53] Even the air becomes filled with alien corpuscles, “numbers escaped from the stock exchange or dots and dashes of Morse code that look singularly like bacilli” (Mac Orlan, “Le fantastique,” 8). The same ideas recur in his novel Quartier réservé (1932), set somewhere in Algeria, in a town near Oran rendered as indistinguishable from France. “The whole fantastical existence of broadcasting,” the narrator observes while wandering through the red-light district, “is composed of meowing, hissing, whistling, sudden fits of anger, and ill-defined lamentations . . . between two waltz turns on the airwaves of Leipzig.”[54]

Restlessness, discomfort, and vitiated air remain omnipresent motifs, even in Mac Orlan’s most laudatory text, an essay for Lumière et Radio entitled “État du ciel” (State of the Sky, 1932). Radio is portrayed as a versatile instrument able to disseminate anything from information about the stock markets to jazz music through to “secret calls to arms.”[55] The listener, he argues, “breathes in this food whose effects are still unknown” (Mac Orlan, “État du ciel,” 1). In “TSF” (Wireless, 1927), republished in 1932 as “Le Chasseur d’ondes à l’écoute dans la nuit mystérieuse” (The Hunter of Soundwaves Listening in the Mysterious Night), radio’s conquest of the air is tied more explicitly to war, borders and belonging. Mac Orlan portrays himself listening to radio at night in an atmosphere “swollen with music, women’s voices, dead words, and calls.”[56] In the silence, he hears “the sky dilating, the horizons pushing its boundaries back in a soft rustling interspersed with shocks and low, unknown hissing” (Mac Orlan, “TSF,” 344). The call “[a]llo Praha!” from the Prague station ushers in “extraordinary processions of apparitions and phantoms,” and “puny voices made terrifying by the idea of distance”:

All the phantoms of Europe, and perhaps all the phantoms of this world and the world beyond, which I cannot capture, grind their teeth, try to seduce me with their song or moan as they stamp their feet. . . . Orchestras mingle and overlap. . . . The whole of this European celebration fits, in this moment, in the two small circles covering my ears. The house where I am sitting no longer seems secured to the ground. Nothing about my familiar belongings is real anymore; the sky populated with waves, with disciplined sounds and words translated in Morse code imposes its own reality at the detriment of my daily habits and plans for this evening’s work. . . . The English, the Poles, the Dutch, the Italians, the Spaniards, the Germans have come to me, tonight. They are lurking around my house. They want to come in and knock at the door. I, the hunter of soundwaves, stand behind my closed door and keep guard, and I only let in the unknown speaker or singer capable of giving me the marvelous detail, that very small detail I can hear in a well-tuned transmission, which will allow me to write, then withdraw from a night that is proving too laden with melancholy and regret. (344)

Another text for Lumière et Radio, a short story entitled “Le Poste” (The Wireless Set, 1929), summons memories of military invasion. War, Mac Orlan writes, “lives within each one of us like a secret malady. It grows, seems to go numb, then unleashes its odious and unnecessary disasters.”[57] Then he concedes: “But we never know for certain that war is unnecessary. At such a stage of human irresponsibility, when facing such catastrophes, the necessary and the unnecessary can no longer be differentiated” (Mac Orlan, “Le Poste,” 19). The setting is an isolated French farm in “a landscape for future wars,” scarred by “the distinguished desolation of war memories” (19). At the end of the working day, the wireless set is placed on the table, the windows are closed, and the farmer, his laborers and servants listen silently “to Paris,” then “to Warsaw”:

[A] Polish voice blossomed in the silence. The Polish maids smiled. They stood up as though they wanted to run towards this marvelous voice, whose power was shining bright on a thousand images they thought they had forgotten. A country of another essence was unfurling its decors inside a French farm. . . . Others who were from Czechoslovakia heard the Praha station. Men of their race had not forgotten about them, that much was certain. They felt less alone and, once the set was turned off, they sang, quietly at first, out of politeness, then their voices rose up. They could be heard from afar through the countryside. The farm was humming with hymns, like a kind of international church. Lost waves were spreading into the air in concentric circles growing ever larger, towards Warsaw, towards Prague. (20)

The next morning, all return to work, emotions forgotten. As in Mac Orlan’s other radio tales, the unease lingers; the threat is inconclusive.

What makes Malard’s and Divoire’s writings distinctive is their factual precision: unlike Mac Orlan’s texts, whose coordinates remain hazily evocative, Malard and Divoire offer a comprehensive catalogue of European stations available to radio enthusiasts in France. Divoire’s column for Lumière et Radio mentions particularly fondly Hilversum, Daventry, Berlin, Bratislava, Prague, Brno, Moravska-Ostrava, the Milan-Turin-Genoa station, Rome, Barcelona, Madrid, and Motala. Each station is associated with particular sounds, voices, atmospheres. He patiently itemized the sounds used as time signals:

Moravska-Ostrava: the clear sound of a copper bell, slightly cracked; Budapest: the carillon of University Church; Kosice: bells; Cologne: the carillon of Trinity Church; Barcelona: old and ripe bells; Huizen: small and slow bells, striking noon without haste, at the pace at which things should be done in order to be done well; Copenhagen and Kalundborg: carillon; Schaerbeek: carillon, reminding us of the Flemish crowds who, in the evening, gather in Malines around Saint Rumbold’s Cathedral to listen to Jef Denyn, the old carillon player. . . . Kracow, Warsaw, Katowice: fanfare of bells from the tower of Notre Dame Cathedral in Kracow—this is tradition too, of a slightly different kind, involving less padding, and a little more romantic chivalry. Poznan: fanfare of bells from the top of the City Hall tower. One wonders whether the bells are rung by a helmeted warrior, by a clerk from the City Hall or, on rainy days, by a phonograph record.[58]

With less precision, Malard’s poems evoke broadcasts and voices heard on radio stations in Vienna, Brno, Bern, Warsaw, Katowice, Prague, Kovno (Kaunas), Bucharest, Ljubljana, Brussels, Bratislava, Huizen, Lwow (Lviv), Istanbul, San Sebastián, Motala, Linz, and London. They both liked to look for Francophile alliances on the airwaves. Divoire, who was particularly fond of Moravska-Ostrava’s speakers, described how listening to a French lesson given by a Czech speaker—whom he imagined with a black beard, “like a pope or like the bass voice in a Russian choir”—had made him feel like “one of these internationalists who, after a long sojourn abroad, wants to kiss the train conductor on the PLM or East railways upon their first encounter with a French voice.”[59] Malard wrote with élan about “the quintuple wavelength / of Brno, Bratislava / Moravska, Prague, and Kosice” that supported the teaching of French.[60] She also dedicated an ode to Francophile foreign announcers, listing Katowice, the Swiss Romand radio, Prague, Kovno, Bucharest, Ljubljana, Brussels, Bratislava, Québec, and Montréal as “rings / tying our souls together” (Malard, Radiophonies, 81). The poem relates how a voice from Budapest satisfied her yearning to hear French spoken and alleviated her weariness of interferences and linguistic guesses.

In their maps of the radio world, we can discern the same hope that radio might revive a collective and specifically French sense of nationhood. For Malard and Divoire, it could create unique moments of national cohesion and they saw it as their duty to pose as witnesses to its achievements. One radio event proved particularly important for both: the arrival of Dieudonné Costes and Maurice Bellonte in New York after their first non-stop flight across the Atlantic on September 1–2, 1930. The aviators’ arrival and speeches were broadcast live on Radio-Paris, through a complex series of relays between Curtiss Field, Schenectady, Rugby, and Radio-Paris. In Paris, special loudspeakers were installed on the terrace of the Automobile Club, where a large public gathered.[61] Numerous tributes appeared in the French press and the colonial press.[62] Anna de Noailles, who had been the first French poet to read on air, greeted the event with deep fervor.[63] Larronde too saw the broadcast as “a sublime moment, full of truth,” which “transformed millions of men into heroes, simply because radio enabled them to be [Costes and Bellonte’s] witnesses” (“Universalité de la radio,” 103–4). For Divoire, the broadcast marked “the day of glory,” the day when “[t]he poetry of the wireless reached its apotheosis”:

That evening, a voice was heard from beyond the seas, and a profound emotion seized thousands of men and women who had not previously understood the lyricism of radio, who had not understood that it is a living thing; that it is the only art able to nourish the imagination in a way that is worthy of its demands, that it can make the whole of the ocean visible through a voice coming from afar.[64]

In a poem she read on Radio LL to mark Costes and Bellonte’s return, Malard evoked an “accolade” between “two races” joining one another over the Atlantic (Radiophonies, 60). “The ether,” she concluded, “becomes chronicler / of a victory won over itself!” (61). She remembered the broadcast as the major revelation that spurred her to dedicate herself to radio.[65] Subsequently, she published a volume of poems entirely about radio, Radiophonies (1931). The title seems untranslatable, playing on radio as a system of transmissions and a system of languages. The book received a prize from the French Academy, like several of Malard’s other works, and transformed her into the semi-official poet of the state-owned radio network.[66] Her poetry spoke to common fears that radio might take over the world, that it might invade cities with relentless noise, that the harmony it brings may be short-lived and superficial.

Radiophonies—a succession of odes to distant listening, often at night, and sometimes to the Pope’s speeches—takes as its themes concerts and international relays, as well as the stuff of broadcasting technology: transmission masts, antennas, and interferences. The poems are situated in a space where voices, soundwaves, and geopolitical forces defined by countries and cities crisscross. Radio is variously portrayed as an “immaterial and caressing coil” that “curls around the world, panting, vanquished”; as the tool that will bring down “the old hatred” between European countries; and as a “cage / Where only French was previously sung,” and where each European language “opens its beak and flaps its wings” (Malard, Radiophonies, 28, 72, 122). Soundwaves lure and threaten. “Initiation” stages a speaker trapped by encircling soundwaves, “at once immobile and seized with vertigo” (9). “Mappemonde” (Desk Globe) presents a speaker dreaming of Hilversum, Helsinki, Rome, Riga, Lahti, Motala, and Warsaw, yet afraid to give in to those unknown voices calling in. Elsewhere, radio is alternately the muse whom the poet courts and a counterpart to the poet herself, capable of the same intense poetic feeling. Malard depicts the airwaves as an overpopulated territory in which there is not enough room for all, and as the suspended and infinitely stretchable site of “permanent cosmopolitan enchantment” that makes it possible to “dream in Vienna,” “moan in Stamboul,” “laugh in Paris,” “pray in Rome,” and “dance in San Sebastian” (123). Another poem, “Interferences,” associates radio with mutual invasion, with Zurich and San Sebastián in competition, Madrid and Rabat in tension, Stockholm and Rome in conflict (32). The ether has no space for an autonomous voice, the poem concludes; there would be greater harmony with stronger separation between wavelengths and cultures.

The tension discernible in these poems, which deploy a language suggesting fear and threat on the one hand, while, on the other, articulating hopes for fraternity and exchange, is a mainstay in Malard’s radio essays. In essays for La Revue de France from 1934 and 1935, she recalled transmissions of the funerals of kings and prominent political figures and aspired for a new kind of program truly able to ignite nationalist fervor. French radio, she argued, needed broadcasts that “can give form to the moments when our national emotions should electrify the air waves.”[67] She envisaged such programs as the work of a cultural elite drawn from established French writers and public speakers, and from a superior class of listeners willing to contribute “their vigilance, their curiosity and their testimonies.”[68] Simultaneously, she wished for “plays that have been composed to recreate the atmosphere, the history and the folklore of our most famous cities,” with “commentaries spoken in different languages” superimposed onto “recorded montages,” of a kind that would enable “Italy [to] prepare a version of Venice traversed by the calls of the gondoliers; England, a version of London animated by the bells of Westminster, the echo of the royal carriage, the hubbub of the docks; Belgium, the harmonics that resonate in the silence of Bruges” (Malard, “Le Théâtre radiophonique,” 189). “Who knows,” she concluded, “what might emerge from this encounter between nations and voices?” (189). Divoire’s writings too extol the capacity of radio to bring souls together. He saw radio as a force able to foster a new kind of tolerance. Radio enables all religious faiths to enter the listener’s home, he remarked, making the public “more indulgent, more understanding.”[69] “What often prevents us from understanding one another,” he concluded, “is our refusal to hear one another” (Divoire, “En écoutant . . . L’Office,” 4). At the same time, his reflections on distant listening frequently turn to belonging and patrimony, in a manner that accords with a view tentatively expressed in some of his journalism: that distant listening enables one to measure true national specificity, to reinforce one’s grasp of the irreducibility of national character.[70]

Unlike Divoire, who was not a practicing Catholic and was only interested in Catholic doctrine as a way of crafting his understanding of occultism, Malard had an evangelical agenda for radio, both in terms of her awareness of what radio could preach on the political and religious fronts, and in terms of what it could do to strengthen adhesion to the Catholic Church.[71] But her humanitarianism was conflicted, and only went as far as her admiration for monarchies, empires, and ideas of racial purity took her. In her essays, she envisaged the French colonization of North Africa as part of the natural order of things, expressing admiration for Hubert Lyautey (“the great hero of colonization”) and Joseph Joffre, and she returned to the idea that France had an inimitable, immortal soul of its own, still radiating throughout the world including in Quebec.[72] Whenever she described radio as a vehicle for great moments of national cohesion in her essays and poetry, she did so in a manner inflected by her racialist thinking, using the word “race” as a synonym of nation or country, as many of her contemporaries also did. An essay from 1940 co-authored with her mother, notably, calls for broadcasts that would be “wholesome, respectful of the truth and of the traditions that give a race its strength and nobility” (Malard, “La Radiophonie et l’âme française,” 72). She was also aware of how readily radio could serve authoritarianism, and how radio had propped up Hitler’s regime; she discussed the pro-Hitlerian Putsch of July 1934 at the Vienna station of the Ravag and the Nazi use of political surveillance, and issued stern warnings about radio’s vulnerability to lies, misinformation, and propaganda (Malard, “La Radiophonie, art autonome,” 568, 570). In 1940, in a public talk in Monte Carlo, where she had lived with her mother since the 1920s, she denounced the Nazi utilization of radio, argued that radio and cinema should be deployed in a coordinated counter-propaganda effort, and recited patriotic poems of her own making.[73] That same year, she argued that radio was central to “moral rearmament,” describing radio as “a pacific factory for national defense” (Malard, “La Radiophonie et l’âme française,” 77). She was recognized as a skilled propagandist; shortly before war broke out, her radio works Laënnec, génie français and “Les Anges de Paris” were lauded as “good French propaganda.”[74]

Malard’s most vibrant defense of radio’s internationalism appeared in 1943 in the Pétainist Nice newspaper L’Eclaireur du Soir and was republished in L’Action Française. There, Malard returned to notions that had been the bread and butter of radio drama columns during the early 1930s, citing ideas from texts by Larronde and others about radio as a “theatre of space” and a “theatre of souls” free from common dramatic constraints.[75] Her thoughts briefly turned to the present, in an appeal for acceptance and appeasement:

Who can pretend that they are working for posterity today? One would have to believe that one is a genius to hold such pretension. Even genius remains at the mercy of the unbelievable turmoil devouring our world on fire. For our part, we simply want to make our contemporaries feel, for a few minutes, that their overwhelming and anguished life is less unbearable. (Boyer, “Chronique des ondes: Impressions d’auteurs,” 3)

The true vocation of radio, Malard concludes, is to be “a machine that can renovate the arts, that can bring minds and peoples closer together” (3). The interviewer, Max Jalade, quickly curbed her reflection, arguing that efforts to bring nations together always fail. Without objecting, she returned to a view she had previously developed in La Revue de France: that radio “is not a simple instrument of communication like the telephone or the typewriter, but truly a new means of expression, which has its own values like painting, music, theatre, and the cinema. . . . It resuscitates, it recreates” (3).

There is nothing paradoxical about Malard asserting radio’s universality in 1943 in the newspaper of Maurras’s monarchist movement, long characterized by its violent nationalism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia. This was the culture that Divoire and Mac Orlan also inhabited; they thrived in the literary world of the authoritarian Vichy regime and Nazi Occupation—a small pond, ultimately, in need of all the radio-related expertise it could get.[76] In Monaco, Malard found refuge in writing about Catholicism and patriotism, producing biographies of religious figures with her mother and patriotic poetry, including a poem dedicated to the first French soldier to die on the Maginot Line and a volume entitled Présence des absents (The Absents’ Presence, 1943).[77] Présence des absents is driven by a belief dear to Pétainism: that suffering must be tolerated and self-renewal can only be found in suffering. Her wartime work, dealing largely with acceptance and appeasement, was lauded in the collaborationist press and found grace with the Vichy regime: the radio works she wrote with her mother were broadcast on Radio National and Radio Vichy from 1940 to 1943, and she received a prize for Présence des absents from the Société des Poètes Français. When the war ended, Malard was quickly seen by some as persona non grata, as shown in a letter that Dermée, temporarily appointed by the Radiodiffusion Française as Director of Programs in Toulouse, sent to Germinet in November 1944. While wishing to see a rapid and uncompromising purge of undesirable elements, Dermée cryptically portrayed the Malards as manipulators and evoked non-specific scandalous activities pursued in Monte Carlo. It proved difficult, at that point, to think of experienced radio authors above suspicion. Divoire, too, was seen as excessively compromised.[78]

There were reasons for this: Divoire had become one of the visible faces of the collaborationist press. In February 1941, he was appointed editor-in-chief of Paris-Midi—a fervent anti-Semitic publication, which greeted with glee news of deportations and roundups and, like other collaborationist newspapers, made denunciations and calls for executions and deportations its bread and butter. Divoire became celebrated for his lucidity and competence by the most xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and pro-Nazi newspapers in the occupied zone and the “free” zone under Vichy rule, including L’Action française and Je suis partout.[79] His wartime admirers included luminaries of the collaborationist press such as Noël B. de la Mort (Noël Bayon), who praised his intellect in L’Appel, the newspaper of the Milice Révolutionnaire Française.[80] By then, radio was an occasional pursuit for Divoire, but his prewar radio plays won him more recognition than ever before: in March 1944, he received the radio prize of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques.[81] In his prewar journalism, Divoire had made quietism and irony his specialty; his near-daily column for Paris-Midi, entitled “Méridien de Paris,” retained those same qualities, covering cultural titbits and in-the-moment personal observations like his Lumière et Radio column, and using the same tone: light-hearted, humorous, and sometimes mildly sarcastic. “Méridien de Paris” remained front-page matter from February 1941 until the liberation of Paris in August 1944, when the offices of Paris-Midi were taken over. In it, Divoire regularly proffered obedience; in 1941, for example, he celebrated Philippe Pétain, François Darlan, Charles Huntziger, and Maxime Weygand as selfless war heroes who understand history and should be followed no matter what the future holds.[82] What distinguishes his column is its sharp disconnect with war events and surrounding headlines, its militant quietism that normalizes occupation and war. In the last issue of Paris-Midi to appear in its collaborationist guise before the arrival of the Allied forces, he depicts a Paris quiet, joyful, and carefree, right under a leading propaganda headline announcing decisive Wehrmacht wins across the Western front.[83] His propagandist work was not forgotten. In 1944, Les Lettres françaises mined the Paris-Midi archives and relayed an internal description of him as “[a] collaborator remarkable for his docility and suppleness.”[84] In 1945, his membership of the Société des Gens de Lettres was revoked, as part of group sanctions taken against writers known to have “compromised themselves with Hitlerism.”[85] By that point, his writing career had come to an end. In 1946, alongside other prominent collaborators, he was suspended from working for eighteen months by the Comité National d’Epuration; subsequently, the case against him was dismissed. The problem was not so much what he had written or his editorial practices, but that he had made substantial financial gains from his work for the collaborationist press.[86]

As for Mac Orlan, he wrote for the collaborationist press of Vichy and Paris, contributing to Jean Luchaire’s Les Nouveaux Temps and to publications characterized by their rabid anti-Semitism and political fanaticism such as Je suis partout, La Gerbe, La Légion, and Combats (the publication of the French Militia), several of which saw the Vichy regime as insufficiently collaborationist.[87] He was held in high esteem; from 1941 to 1944, he was one of the dignitaries who joined the jury of Luchaire’s Prix de la Nouvelle France, funded by Luchaire’s Nazi propagandist allies.[88] In 1944, Lucien Rebatet—a leading voice in French fascism, remembered for his extreme anti-Semitism—named the “charming” Mac Orlan as one of the great talents of Vichy France, on a par with Drieu la Rochelle and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, despite his refusal to “do politics.”[89] After the collapse of the Vichy regime, Mac Orlan had “difficulties” but was never formally sanctioned.[90] Unlike Divoire, he was not a first-page contributor to the collaborationist press. Nothing resembling a political commentary could be traced back to him. His prewar reputation had largely been made through his frequent radio appearances: he had given numerous talks on Radio-Paris between 1929 and 1932, on subjects aligned with his journalism including military music, publicity, the Foreign Legion, the café concert, street musicians, the London police, the railways, and the modern guises of adventure—alongside contributions to Lumière et Radio, Les Cahiers de Radio-Paris, and a publicity brochure for the brand Rees Radio. He returned to radio after the war. From 1947 to 1966, he created many radio talks and plays and was involved in various radio adaptations. His radio work has been largely underestimated, not least because he never made much of his extensive experience.

Ultimately, Divoire, Malard, and Mac Orlan were small fry in the constellations of collaborators who populated wartime France; their acquiescence was all too ordinary and—as with many others—seemed motivated by the desire to safeguard the social order in which they occupied a stable place as writers. Yet their direction matters when we consider the intense engagement with radio for which they became renowned during the 1930s: as Gisèle Sapiro has demonstrated, what World War II produced in the French literary world is neither mysterious nor difficult to explain, but is an amplification and a continuation of alignments and allegiances affirmed long before.[91] The ease with which these writers inhabited the airwaves and the world of radio commentary prior to the war played a role in bolstering their public status thereafter, turning them into voices representative of the national character they had so celebrated—a vision of the nation by then grounded in morally intolerable compromises. In their later political choices, we can discern an amplification of the beliefs they had previously articulated about culture and their previous visions of a national specificity permanently under threat. In a prewar context, their views on radio appear relatively neutral, sometimes quaint, and often charming; however, considered in another context, that of occupied France—where internationalism was synonymous with acceptance and collaboration, and Europe meant a Europe ruled by Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco—their visions of radio take on a different dimension. As pleasant and evocative as their literature of distant listening might be, it remains a torn corpus crossed by visions of lost national and imperial greatness that perceives radio’s innate internationalism as a threat to sovereignty and hankers for a medium able to foster a deeper sense of belonging, a more visceral nationalism than the printed press or the cinema. In their now forgotten discussions of distant listening—which remained confined to the safer space of the late 1920s and early 1930s—we can trace a mistrust of other cultures, a hope that radio will reinforce extant power relations and hierarchies, and a seeming quietism that reclaims the registers of universalism and internationalism for its own nationalist ends.

Notes