Lectures and Notes

...Long before we have finished From Proust to Camus we know exactly how Maurois will tackle each author...

...all are here in essence, ineffectually hidden under the mask of adolescent sentimentality...

...Looking down the table of contents we see the expected names, the French authors who have gained a wide international readership, from Proust, Gide and Valery (but why only the prose Valery...

...They are elegant paraphrases, combining biography judiciously with brief descriptive analyses of the various writers' works...

...These are the writers whose works we know, even if we have not—as in the case of Sartre's philosophical monstrosities—always read them to the end...

...If Maurois presents a broad show window where none of his wares are exhibited to full advantage, Gustave Flaubert's Intimate Notebook 184041 is a minute vitrine illuminating a fragment of a great artist's youth...

...original world, and we walk into it as we might walk into a strange city where we quickly find ourselves at home...

...Even so, a book of this type, in which a French homme tie lettres picks what seem to him the most significant writers of his own country and his own time, has a kind of interest that its author doubtless did not intend...

...Maurois' lectures contain neither new facts—except for a few slight personal anecdotes—nor startling critical apercus...

...to Malraux and Camus...

...In From Proust to Camus he is back?0 years later?at the game of international interpretation...

...He is an expert at the causerie in its more insubstantial sense, the entertaining chatter about literature that in the end becomes cloyingly boring...

...One recognizes again the bland voice of a generation ago, grown perhaps a little weaker, but as ingratiating as ever, and as lacking in resonances...

...It comes down, in the end, to a question of concreteness and ab-stractness...

...But scattered in the same list are the great French writers who are familiar by name, yet whom few of us, after one effort, have continued to read—Henry Alain-Fournier, for example, Jacques de Lacretelle, even Paul Claudel...

...The text is a mere 36 pages, and even with introduction and notes it amounts to only 68 pages, priced at an exorbitant four dollars in the hope of making good on the captive library trade...

...4.00...

...Alain, on the other hand, creates only an abstract structure, a city plan which—in the true sense of abstraction—leaves out so much that only those who belong to his culture know enough of what is taken for granted to move into it, and move on into their own worlds, as undoubtedly many talented young Frenchmen did under the influence of this remarkable teacher...

...the sado-Gothic self that wrote Salammbo...

...The Intimate Notebook is a fragment, but it helps to complete a splendid mosaic...

...Unlike many such over-priced items, though, it is still worth buying for its extraordinary glimpse of one of the world's important novelists at the point when his literary personality was just beginning to crystallize...

...The romantic self that emerged in L'Education Sentimen-tale...

...This book consists of a series of lectures which the octagen-arian author gave recently to introduce Princeton students to the great writers of 20th-century France...

...He creates a new...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell" Andre Maurois had a vogue between the great wars as a literary mediator...

...There is a whole company of French writers of this kind, excellent no doubt in their own settings, immensely stimulating to their compatriots, but like those fine little wines from Franche-Comte or the Dordogne, apparently unexportable...

...Certainly nothing that Maurois says makes it easier for us to connect with them, and this failure is something more than the shortcomings of one particular mediator...

...Analytical criticism is completely lacking, and Maurois appears unconcerned with, or perhaps even unaware of, the esthetic qualities of the volumes he is discussing...

...there are no surprises, no bites into magic cakes that open new vistas of understanding...

...Alain, Claudel, Lacretelle are no more French than Proust or Gide...

...Proust's world of memory (no matter how esoteric the theory on which it is based) is visible, tangible, audible, wholly French and at the same time wholly present...

...INTIMATE NOTEBOOK 1840-1841 By Gustave Flaubert Translated by Francis Steegmuller Doubleday...

...He romantically interpreted British writers—Disraeli, Dickens, Shelley, Bryon, Lytton?for French readers, and as it turned out, for many English ones, since his books in translation sold more rapidly in the great suburban wildernesses of the Home Counties than the literary biographies of his English competitors...

...they simply lack the additional quality which makes them, like good claret, French and universal...

...the self that could declare, "Emma Bovary, e'est mop...

...It is a translation of the Souvenirs, notes, et pensees intimes written when Flaubert was 19 and published in Paris in 1965 from the surviving typed copy of a notebook (the original vanished during the 1930s...