Victor Llona - Part of The French Literary Scene

Part of The French Literary Scene

A few pages of Llona's Memoirs have been published, in which he speaks about his friendship with French writers, such as Pierre Benoit, Marcel Proust, Francis Carco, Henri Poulaille, Jean Galtier-Boissière, Jules Supervielle, Paul Morand, Pierre Mac Orlan, Jacques de Lacretelle, Julien Green and Roger Martin du Gard. He remained also a friend of the major NRF figures, like André Gide, Jean Schlumberger, Valéry Larbaud, André Ruyters and Jacques Rivière. Llona also had great friendship with the Belgian poet and designer Jean de Bosschère (1878–1953), who made a lithographed portrait of him. He also wrote an essay on the French writer Louis Thomas and befriended him and his opera singing wife Raymonde Delaunois.

Llona remained also in contact with American writers of the 'Lost Generation', amongst them Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Nathalie Clifford Barney, Paul Bowles, Thornton Wilder and Scott Fitzgerald. He met them in the apartments of Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) and Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) or at the English library of Sylvia Beach (1887–1962), the first publisher in 1922 of James Joyce's Ulysses.

In 1929 Shakespeare and Company, the library of Sylvia Beach, published a book with twelve articles, brought together by Eugene Jolas (1894–1952), the editor of transition, defending 'Work in progress', the book by Joyce that would be published only ten years later under the title 'Finnegans wake'. In this book titled Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, Llona was one of the twelve authors and wrote under a very much 'Joycian' title: ‘I Dont Know What to Call It but Its Mighty Unlike Prose’ .

In 1939 With the war approaching, Llona, remarried, left France and established himself in Lima. In 1946 he returned to the US and became a translator for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). When having heart problems, he settled in San Francisco, where he died.