Volume 2, Number 2 · March 5, 1964
Odd Man Out
By Susan Sontag
Manhood
by Michel Leiris, Translated from the French by Richard Howard
Grossman, 162 pp., $4.00
Plunked down in translation in the year 1963, Michel Leiris's brilliant and repulsive autobiographical narrative L'Age d'Homme, is at first rather puzzling. Manhood, as it is called in English, appears without any covering note. There is no way for the reader to find out that Leiris, now in his sixties and the author of some twenty books none of which are yet in English, is an important poet and senior survivor of the Surrealist generation in Paris in the 1920s, and a fairly eminent anthropologist. Nor does the English edition explain that Manhood is not recent—that it was in fact written in the early 1930s, first published in 1939, and republished with an important prefatory essay, 'Literature Considered as a Bullfight,' in 1946, when it had a great succès de scandale. Even aside from the fact that autobiographies are not usually attractive unless we have some prior interest—or reason for becoming interested—in the writer, the fact that Leiris is unknown here complicates matters, because his book makes unusual demands on our interest in the author as a man.
Review, 2519 words
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