Marcel Schwob: 1867-1967

MARCEL SCHWOB: 1867-1967 John A. Green's interest in the late nineteenth-century French author, Marcel Schwob, has extended to several articles and the acquisition of a collection of Schwob manuscripts and documents at Brigham Young University . He has a doctorate from the University of Washington and was on the faculties of the University of North Dakota (1960-1963) and the University of Wichita (1963-1964) before joining the faculty of Brigham Young University in 1964. In 1951 André Billy, in his book L'Epoque 19 00, observed that "Marcel Schwob est oublié," and then added, "ou plutôt il est tout entier à redécouvrir." (p. 136) Four years later Roger Shattuck, in The Banquet Years, called attention to Schwob as "a singularly neglected figure." (p. 151 n.) The response to these challenges has been a few scattered articles in French, Italian, and American periodicals , and the republication of some of Schwob's titles, including, for example, Le Livre de MoneÜe and Spicilège in 1959 and /60— which I reviewed for the French Review of May 1962—Vite immaginarie , published in Italy in 1954, and Gabe an die unterweit, an anthology released in the popular Fischer pocketbook series in 1960. It is interesting that no French scholar has yet undertaken to write an academic thesis on Schwob, but four Americans and an Italian scholar have completed doctoral dissertations on him since 1950; the first graduate course and seminar on him were offered at the University of Ottawa this past year, and he is the subject of three more dissertations currently in progress in England and Italy. I am hopeful that more academic work will be done on him in America and especially in this area now that Schwob's heir and family are helping to establish at Brigham Young University a rather vast memorial collection of both unpublished and published correspondence, manuscripts, documents , and so on—the largest collection to date of holographic materials and manuscripts of Schwob in the world. Since none of the academic research on Schwob has yet resulted in publication, however, all that the modern generation knows of him can be traced directly to the work of medievalist scholar, Pierre Champion , who was acting as secretary to Schwob when the latter died in 1905. In the twenties, after the Mercure de France had brought out a two volume edition of Schwob's works, Champion published an intimate little portrait of Marcel Schwob, and the more ambitious Marcel Schwob et son temps. Then, working in close collaboration with the gifted actress Marguerite Moreno , Schwob's widow, he brought out the ten volume Oeuvres compl ètes de Marcel Schwob (19271930 ), for which he furnished extensive forewords, biography, bibliography, and notes. During the second world war, however, Schwob suffered an eclipse, and as I have indicated, Billy and Shattuck, in the 1950's, both felt strongly that much more work needed to be done on Schwob. Claude Pichois echoed their challenge in an article for the Mercure de France of June 1959. 17 Today, the need for a new, published study has become particularly acute since the Champion biographies and the Oeuvres complètes have become virtually impossible to find. A general introduction to Marcel Schwob may therefore not be out of place here, considering the need expressed by others, the fine memorial collection now established in the Rocky Mountain area, and, perhaps , the fact that the centenary of this writer occurs in 1967. In the first place, Champion's picture of Schwob as another Proust, pale, sickly and socially sensitive, needs some retouching. Years before either Champion or Moreno knew him, he was a healthy, energetic writer, scholar, newspaper editor and reporter with 160 articles and short stories to his credit, as well as two treatises on slang, two lengthy translations, and four collections of his short stories in volume form. He had attended Tuesday literary sessions at Mallarmé's and with the group at the Mercure de France, read several papers before three learned Academies and Societies , lectured on Ibsen at the University of Geneva and on John Ford at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, corresponded with Robert Louis Stevenson and George Meredith...