Trousson’s Biography of Rousseau

472 AUBREY ROSENBERG bliss, though it was threatened repeatedly by eruptions of White's manic fury and self-loathing. At the heart of the reticence in this biography stands Manoly Lascaris, again the living person, who is thanked for his forbearance and help, but whose lingering presence requires that the veil remaindrawn over the unsculptured image of the relationship. This story too has yet to be told. Much of the story that is told is recounted from White's own point of view. The early chapters portray White's parents from the perspective of the rebellious adolescent intolerant oftheirhopelessly provincial values. Onefeels that horses and tea parties and turn-of-the-century Australia are unnecessarily vilified in the process. Marr's description of the fall of Smyrna, though purporting to be a neutral accQunt, is actually White's biased view, which he derived from the Lascaris family, who lost a great deal of wealth in Asia Minor. From my knowledge of the event, derived from many Greek people who lived through it, it is quite untrue that 'only a handful of Greeks reached the Allied ships' and escaped death. Indeed, many cities of the world, including Toronto, were enriched in the 1920s and early 19305 by waves of immigrants who were refugees from Asia Minor. By all accounts, their sins in Turkey had been numerous, including a thorough disdain for the indigenous people of their host country. But White would have none of it; he was extremely intolerant of any account that minimized the suffering of the Greek populace or viewed the Turks as anything but 'ignorant, barbaric savages.' In this, as in a number of other political situations, his judgments were single-minded and uncritical. One expects his biographer to point such failures out. It seems Marr accepts White's view, in this as in so many other instances, be~ause he has not sufficiently separated himself from White's interests, or cultivated the critical distance that might allow him to begin to probe the writer as his subject, rather than to reflect him as his mentor and sQurce. One notices this failing most acutely in his treatment of the novels. Again and again/ Marr fails to cut deeply enough. He works largely on the premise of a naive identification of the art and the life. His assessment of Mary de Santis is whitewashed by his knowledge that she is based on White's beloved childhood nurse, Lizzie Clark; Basil and Dorothy are viewed as direct reflections ofWhite and his sister, rather than poisonous offshoots of Goneril, Regan, and Edmund; and Eddie/Eadith on the park bench with his mother is read as the homosexual child entirely accepted. These are only some instances where a more searching approach might have yielded a deeper vision of the writers life, though without a doubt, more blood as well. Trousson's Biography of Rousseau AUBREY ROSENBERG Raymond Trousson. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. II. Le deuil tclatant du bonheur Editions Tallandier 1989. 553 The second and final volume ofTrousson'5 excellent biography of Rousseau begins after the pub~ication of the Lettre ad'Alembert (1758) and takes us to his death in ROUSSEAU 473 1778. It deals, then, with the events in Rousseau's life surrounding the composition of all the major works that brought him such fame and notoriety, sympathy and hostility. During this period he published JuHeau La NouvelleHt!lofse (1761), the most popular French novel of the eighteenth century; Emile 011 De l'education (1762), the treatise that radically transformed education in the Western world; Du contrat social (1762), the handbook of Robespierre; Les Confessions, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, and Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire, all three published posthumously and all defining our modern conception of autobiography. It was also during this period that Rousseau experienced, with Sophie d'Houdetot , the only real love of his life, unfortunately unrequited; he severed relations, once and for all, with Voltaire, was exiled from France, hounded out ofSwitzerland, held prisoner in England, where he was persecuted by David Hume (at least, according to Rousseau'5 account, which, in Trousson'5 hands, is not unpersuasive), given refuge, under an assumed name, by the prince...