Volume 25, Number 12 · July 20, 1978
What Chateaubriand Saw
By Hugh Honour
Chateaubriand: A Biography Volume I (1768-1793) The Longed-for Tempests
by George D. Painter
Knopf, 327 pp., $15.00
Chateaubriand was the first major European writer to describe American scenery and life from personal observation. The abbé Prévost had conjured up the background for the last pages of Manon Lescaut—that arid, treeless desert near New Orleans—from his imagination. It was from highly spiced but hardly accurate reports of travelers that Oliver Goldsmith derived his dismal picture of Georgia, 'where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey, / And savage men more murderous than they.' Such touches of local color as there are in Klinger's play about the American Revolution, Sturm und Drang, are second hand. But the author of Atala, René, and Les Natchez had spent some six mouvementé months in North America from July to December 1791. He had been to Philadelphia and Boston, stood enraptured before Niagara, conversed with Indians, joined them in chewing bear steaks, and penetrated the wilderness. In Voyage en Amérique and Mémoires d'outre-tombe Chateaubriand provided in resonant prose accounts of his experience which, from a literary point of view, put all previous, and for that matter all later, books of American travel in the shade. But how much did he in fact draw from personal observation, and how much from the writings of others and his fertile Romantic imagination? This is a problem which has grown ever greater as his writings have been more closely studied.
Review, 2671 words
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