Volume 47, Number 7 · April 27, 2000
Reconstructing the Colonel
By John Weightman
Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort
by Roger Martin du Gard, Translated from the French by Luc Brébion, Translated from the French by Timothy Crouse
Knopf, 778 pp., $35.00
The 1930s now seem so far away that many members of the younger generation outside France, and even in France, may never have come across the works of Roger Martin du Gard. Yet, in his day, he was famous enough to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but even that international accolade is no guarantee of survival. Witness the case of René-François Sully-Prudhomme, the very first winner in 1901, who is now no more than a name in the reference books. But Iremember how eagerly we read Martin du Gard's novels before the war. Now, having looked at them again, together with this unfinished, posthumous volume, which has taken so long to appear in English, I feel that they have a permanent quality. They may seem rather staid and old-fashioned compared to the overpowering intellectual and emotional fluency of Proust, but they have the merit of defining a certain kind of average Frenchness—that is, bourgeois anti-bourgeoisism—which existed strongly at the time, although it may have evaporated to some extent since then, just as Englishness is no longer what it was in those days.
Review, 2582 words
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