Volume 23, Number 13 · August 5, 1976
Careful Rapture
By Sybille Bedford
The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier by
translated, with an introduction and commentaries, Richard McDougall
Charles Scribner's Sons, 536 pp., $14.95
Once upon a time there was a young French girl who loved prose and poetry and art. She dreamed about minding a bookshop. Though of country stock, she was born and bred in Paris. Her father was a postal clerk who sorted mail on trains; her mother educated her. The little girl was taken to the theater, allowed to browse at the bookstalls on the quais, and encouraged to read Emerson and the Bhagavad-Gita as well as the French classics. On her own she devoured Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Apollinaire; the Mercure de France, a most up-and-coming literary review at the time, touched off her feeling for the contemporary avant-grade. At seventeen, she later wrote, 'I was as happy as anyone can be at that age of torment…. The three of us [the girl, her mother, a young sister] lived in a state of perpetual enthusiasm for everything that seemed beautiful to us….' The fates—or the deep pull of a vocation: perhaps they were the same?—allowed her to continue in that state of grace through her entire life; those juvenile raptures were the intimations of the sustained devotion, the servitude to art that became the purpose and the center of her existence: a devotion backed by a mature discernment, knowledge, a forceful critical intelligence, a generous heart, and a very great deal of hard work.
Review, 2786 words
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