Volume 41, Number 20 · December 1, 1994
Multicultural Mandarin
By John Weightman
A.O. Barnabooth, His Diary
by Valery Larbaud, translated by Gilbert Cannan, Introduction by Alan Jenkins
Quartet Encounters, 317 pp., £6.95 (paper)
Childish Things
by Valery Larbaud, translated by Catherine Wald
Sun and Moon Press, 208 pp., $13.95 (paper)
Lettres à Adrienne Monnier et à Sylvia Beach, 1919–1933
by Valery Larbaud
IMEC Editions, 362 pp., 250 FF
Larbaud's name is probably no longer widely known even in France, something of him certainly survives, because I recently heard a speaker on the French radio use the phrase 'Ce vice impuni, la lecture' ('Reading, that unpunished vice'), as if it were an anonymous quotation that had passed into the language. It is, in fact, the title given by Larbaud to a collection of critical essays first published in 1924, and—such are the cross-currents of literary history—it was not a phrase of his own invention but a direct translation from a passage in Trivia by Logan Pearsall Smith, a contemporary Anglo-American essayist, now also somewhat forgotten.
Review, 3838 words
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