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André Maurois (1885-1967) - pseudonym of ÉMILE SALOMON WILHELM HERZOG | |
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French biographer, novelist, essayist , best known for his vivid, romantic style lives of Shelley, Disraëli, Byron, Proust, Balzac, and others. André Maurois's The Quest for Proust is considered by many his finest achievement. Through his wife Simone de Caillavet, who had been a member of the refined circles in which Marcel Proust moved, Maurois had a contact with the world of the reclusive author. "The minds of different generations are as impenetrable one by the other as are the monads of Leibniz." (from Ariel, 1923) André Maurois was born Émile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog at Elbeuf,
the oldest of three childred of Ernest Herzog (1865-1925), a textile
manufacturer, and Alice
(Lévy-Rueff) Herzog. The Herzogs had fled Alsace after the
Franco-Prussian War (1870) and the refuge was found in Normandy, where
they established a woolen mill at Elbeuf. At the time of their sons
birth, Ernest and Alice lived at the corner of the rue Henry and the
Place du Champ de Foire, near Elbeuf's center. Maurois had a happy childhood. At school he was a hardworking, brilliant
student. He was educated at the lycée of Elbeuf and Rouen, received
barchelor's degree in letters and science and continued for a degree in
philosophy at the University of Caen. From the age of eighteen to
twenty-six he worked at his father's factory. He was a vey successsful businessman. When the World War I broke out, Maurois was first attached as an interpreter. Overestimating his knowledge of English, Maurois was then made a liaison officer to the British Army. Jeanne-Marie (Janine) Wanda de Szymkiewicz (1892-1924), his first wife, was a Russian girl of Polish descendt, who grew up in Switzerland and had studied at Oxford. They married in 1912. During the war she entered into affairs, and had a nervous breakdown in 1918. Later Maurois portrayed a similar character in Le cercle de famille (1932). She died of septicemia in 1924, at the age of thirty-two, leaving behind three young children. As a novelist Maurois made his debut with The Silence of Colonel Bramble (1918), which was based on his experiences in the war. Anticipating that the caricatures of British soldiers might embrass his friends, he adopted a pseudonym: "Maurois" was the name of a village near Cambrai where he had been engaged in combat, "André" came from a cousin who was killed in the war. In 1947 André Maurois became his legal name. The novel was a bestseller on both sides of the Channel. Bernard Grasset, his publisher, commissioned him to write a sequel, Les Discours du Docteur O'Grady (1922, The Discourses of Doctor O'Grady). Maurois returned from the front with hair turned completely white. After the death his father in 1925, Maurois gave up the family business. He had moved in 1919 from Elbeuf to Paris, where he was welcomed by the literary circles. Part of the year he had spent at La Sayasse, within easy access to the factory. During the 1920s Maurois traveled in England where he researched for his biography of the poet Shelley and met Harold Nicholson, Maurice Baring, Bloomsbury circle of writers, and notables of high British society. In 1926 he married Simone de Caillavet, the daughter of the playwright Gaston de Caillavet and the granddaughter of Anatole France's mistress Léontine Arman de Caillavet. Into her marriage she brought her little daughter from her former annulled marriage to a nonliterary Rumanian diplomat, and estate and chateau, Essendiéras, situated near the village of St. Médard d'Excideuil. Maurois's stepdaughter, Françoise-Georgina, died of cirrhosis of the liver during a vacation in the Alps. Ni ange, ni bête (1919) was inspired by the story of
Percy Shelley and his first wife Harriet Westbrook. The book was
set in Abbeville, a town where Maurois had been stationed
with the British Army. Maurois's light-hearted biography of Shelley,
Ariel, established his fame as an interpreter of the Anglo-Saxon
mind to the French public, and encouraged him to publish novelistic
biographies. Although readers were delighted, Maurois's accurcy was attacked
by reviewers, and moreover, he was accused of plagiarism by a young critic in 'Un
Ecrivain Original. M. André Mauriois (suite)', an article published in
1928 in the Mercure de France. The English journalist and
literary editor Frank Harris stated that sections of Maurois's
essay on Oscar Wilde in Études Anglaises (1927) had
been lifted from his own book, Oscar Wilde, His Life and
Confessions (1916). Noteworthy, Harris himself was known for taking liberties with facts. It was a lesson learned for Maurois and after this public controversy his historical works followed academic standards and were meticulously researched. He once stated: "I am never satisfied to do a hasty or improvised job when asked to write or speak." When writing fiction, Maurois moved from facts to imagination. Le pays des trente-six mille volontés (1928, The Country of Thirty-six Thousand Wishes), a fantasy tale, featured a country where eight times six equals anything one want. It is a place where one will end up after trying unsuccessfully to learn La Fontaine's poem 'The Fox and the Crow' by heart. The sales of his books made Maurois financially
independent and offered him an escape from being just another biographer.
His idealism and romantic conception of life he channeled into his
literary work. One of his characters, Philippe Marcenats, says in Climats
(1928): "I used to compare my life to a symphony wherein mingled
several themes: the theme of the Knight, the theme of the cynic, the
theme of the rival." While traveling in Italy in search of records of
the lives of Lord Byron and Chateaubriand, Maurois met Benito
Mussolini. In Marocco he met Marshal Lyautey, whose biography he
would later write. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Maurois
gave in May 1928 a series of lectures in which he devoleped
further his ideas about the writing of lives. The preceding year
lectures had been given by E.M. Forster. The notes he had used Maurois re-cast in book form, entitled
Aspects de la biographie
(1928, Aspects of Biography). "It is quite possible to discover and to
record defamatory anecdotes abour a writer of genius or a statesman,
but is he, when thus revealed, more truly an ordinary man than the jero
whom a whole people hs seen in him?" 'Maurois asked in the first lecture. "Perhaps the hero
was nothing but a mask, but cannot the mask become the real
personality?" Questioning the juxtaposition of the exact and
historical sciences, Maurois argued that art and science can be reconciled
and that poetry and rhythm are as essential to biography as to
other forms of art. In the following decades, Simone Maurois, gifted with a "merciless memory" became his material and spiritual collaborator, and saved him a lot of work in tracking down historical and biographical information. As a hobby, she collected autographed letters of famous people. "Why do I love my wife?" wrote Maurois in The Art of Being Happily Married (1951). "Well she has the same tastes as I. . . . My wife gives her life to my work, she is my social secretary; she works ten hours per day – and sometimes into the night – and always works well. . . ." Maurois's union with Simone was productive. During the 1920s and 1930s he published biographies of Shelley (1923), Disraeli (1927), Byron (1930), Voltaire (1932), King Edward (1933) and Chateaubriand (1938). Maurois's visit of 1927 in America, where he became a well-known figure, led to a life-long interest in the culture and history of the country. In 1929 Maurois received an invitation from Princeton. Besides giving a formal course on the French novel, he delivered a series of public lectures. For his surprise, he learned that Woodrow Wilson, whom he greatly admired, was a controversial figure in his own college town. As a result, he eventually abandoned plans to write a biography on the president-statesman. Maurois's opinions ranging from Huey Long to the New Deal were widely quoted. "One cannot help calling to mind," Maurois said of Roosevelt's banking reform bill, "as one writers the history of these three crowded months, the Biblical account of the creation." As a recognition of his work, Maurois was appointed a member of the French Academy in 1938. During World War II Maurois served as a captain of the French army and was first attached as a liaison officer to British General Headquarters. After Germany occupied France, Maurois moved with his wife to the Unites States to help with propaganda work. However, Maurois was not a Gaullist but one of the few French writers, who supported the Vichy regime – France "will have, perhaps for a long time, to follow a middle course between what she would like to do and what she feels compelled to do," Maurois wrote in an article, in which he expressed his respect to Marshal Pétain (Life, January 6, 1941). Britain's Consul General reported that Mme Simone Maurois was very anxious to get back to France. In the eyes of the Nazis, he was a Jew, and he would have been transported to death camp. His large collection of book had been seized by Heinrich Himmler's RSHA (SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt) and taken to Berlin. In addition to helping in the war effort, Maurois lectured at University of Kansas City and Mills Colege and wrote several biographies for young readers, among them lives of Frédéric Chopin (1942), General Eisenhower (1945), Franklin (1945), and Washington (1946). In 1943 Maurois joined his writer-associate Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to serve with the Allied Forces in North Africa. They had known each other a long period and had became friends in America. "Either he dominated the conversation or he dreamed of another planet," Maurois said of his friend, who disappeared during flight in 1944. Maurois returned to France in 1946 and entered a new phase in his life. He published several works on French authors; Marcel Proust (1949), George Sand (1953), Victor Hugo (1954) and Balzac (1965). The Life of Sir Alexander Fleming (1959) was written on the request of Lady Amalia Fleming. His histories include The Miracle of England (1937), The Miracle of America (1944), and The Miracle of France (1948). In addition, Maurois contributed articles to Opéra, Elle and other magazines. In 1951, when Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Cannes Film Festival, he served for the first time as President of the jury. On a lecture tour in Italy he met Pope Pius XII in the Vatican, and discussed with him the literary style of Bossuet's Oraison funèbres. "How came it that this prudent, economical man was also generous? That this chaste adolescent, this model father, grew to be, in his last years, an ageing faun? That this legitimist changed, first into a Bonapartist, only, later still, to be hailed as the grandfather of the Republic? That this pacifist could sing, better than anybody, of the glories of the flags of Wagram? That this bourgeois in the eyes of other bourgeois came to assume the stature of a rebel? These are the questions that every biographer of Victor Hugo must answer." (from Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo, 1954) Besides non-fiction, Maurois wrote a juvenile book,
drama, short stories, essays, and science fiction, which drew more from
the satire Cyrano de Bererac and Voltaire than from Jules Verne's
popular adventure stories. Maurois lured his readers by convincing
settings and approved facts, but step by step they enter into the realm
of fantasy. "The best method is to begin by a simple tales," Maurois
once explainend his technique, "in which no unreal element is present
and then to introduce the extraordinary elements only in growing doses
which are gradually incorporated into the paste." (The Worlds of André Maurois
by Jack Kolbert, 1985) In The
Weigher of Souls (1931) a doctor experiments with élan vital and
in La machine à lire les pensées (1937) a
university professor is initiated into mysteries of a photographic film
that records secret thoughts. Maurois's first story was 'La
dernière histoire du monde' (1903), a future history, which was
included in Premiers contes (1935). During his final years Maurois continued to work tirelessly.
He sat at his table either in the study of his Neuilly apartment, where
he had a library of more than 10,000 volumes, or he wrote on the second
floor of his Chateau d'Essendiéras. Maurois died of a pulmonary
congestion on October 9, 1967. He was buried in the old cemetary of
Neuilly. His death was given worldwide attention. As a biographer Maurois is considered unsurpassed. From the beginning of his career, he defined biography as literary art and craft, but at the same time, he demonstrated a recognition of the necessity of research and documentation. His methods, empathetic identification with his subject, dialogue, and representations of inner thoughts and feelings, made his biographies easy to read as novels. For further reading: L'art de commander: selon André Maurois by Cyrille Becker; préface du général de corps d'armée Hervé Wattecamps; postface du général François Labuze (2017); André Maurois, moraliste by Thierry Jacques Laurent (2016); André Maurois (1885-1967): Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Moderate by Lionel Gossman (2014); World Authors 1900-1950, Volume 3, edited by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); The Worlds of André Maurois by Jack Kolbert (1985); 'Maurois, André' by F.V. [Fernand Vial], in Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, edited by Jean-Albert Bédé and William B. Edgerton (1980); André Maurois by L. Keating (1968); Maurois: The Writer and His Work by G.E. Lemaitre (1967); André Maurois by J. Suffel (1963); From My Journal by André Maurois (1947); I Remember, I Remember, by André Maurois (1942); André Maurois by Georges Lemaitre (1939) Selected works and translations:
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