Volume 5, Number 11 · January 6, 1966
Just Friends
By John Weightman
Conversations with Andre Gide
by Claude Mauriac, translated by Michael Lebeck
Braziller, 256 pp., $5.00
Were I to describe this book in the kind of language into which it has been 'translated,' I should say that it is of a comic quite extraordinary. Think then! André Gide, that man so unbelieving, is in his late years the friend of Claude, son of that so Catholic writer, François Mauriac. That son, on his side, intuits the genius of those two giants of French letters and has no desire dearer than to effectuate their conjunction in the Mauriac property of Malagar, in the environs penetrated by the odor of pine of Bordeaux. Down there, before a view the most magnificent in the world, and in an adorable sunlight, those two mâitres are quite off their guards and speak the one to the other with open heart. How droll that moment when Gide, with his deep voice with many trills, reads aloud to Mauriac that passage of the Old Testament where it is a question of the Angels of the Lord who risk to be sodomized by the Sodomites! Claude consigns in writing many of those exchanges…and any reader who knows French well enough to put the text back into the original will be able to guess the meaning in those many places where it has disappeared through the linguistic cracks.
Review, 1459 words
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