Volume 3, Number 5 · October 22, 1964
Puritan Hedonist
By Martin Turnell
Diary 1928-1957
by Julian Green, selected by Kurt Wolff, translated by Anne Green
Harcourt Brace, 313 pp., $6.50
Although the diary as a literary form is by no means a French monopoly, it has become something of a French speciality. We are naturally inclined to assume that any French diary will be filled with scandalous revelations and savage comments on the writer's contemporaries, that the rake will regale us with detailed and vainglorious accounts of his sexual conquests. We are not invariably disappointed. Stendhal's diary contains some useful tips on rape; Amiel records the sensations of a middle-aged professor of aesthetics on the belated loss of his virginity; the Goncourts tell us that the Empress Eugénie suffered from corns in an unlikely part of her anatomy. More recently Montherlant has warmly advocated what he elegantly calls 'affectionate copulation' as a substitute for love and Gide has given us scarifying descriptions of the problems of the married pederast.
Review, 1590 words
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