Andre Maurois' Esthetics of Biography

45 ANDRE MAUROIS' ESTHETICS OF BIOGRAPHY Jack Kolbert Jack Kolbert (B.?., M.?., University of Southern California; Ph.D., Columbia University), came to the University of New Mexico in 1965 from chairing the department of romance languages in the University of Pittsburgh. He has held Fulbright and Ford fellowships and has been awarded governmental honors by the Republic of France and by the states of Pennsylvania and New Mexico. He has published widely and has just finished a 700-page monograph, "The Worlds of André Maurois." Out of his long career as a tireless biographer André Maurois has forged a philosophy of biography. While grappling to achieve an ideal formula, he has developed and followed a group of flexible guidelines. From the very outset, he faced the necessity of defining the nature of biography as a literary genre. Maligned and praised for his initial attempt, Ariel ou la Vie de Shelley (1923), which at first glance resembles a novel more than a biography, he was also maligned and praised for his Don Juan ou la Vie de Byron (1930), whose two well tufted volumes resemble, at first glance, more an historical treatise than a biography. After his succession of lives, of Disraeli, Tourgueniev, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, King Edward VII of England, Proust, Victor Hugo, George Sand, the three Dumas , Sir Alexander Fleming, Madame Adrienne de la Fayette, and Balzac, there is no doubt in anyone's mind that Maurois rightfully deserves the title, "Le Prince des Biographes," as Pierre de Boisdeffre recently called him.1 At the beginning of his career, Maurois had first to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable goals: the biographer's understandable concern for scholarly veracity on the one hand, and the personal point of view of the artist on the other. An accomplished novelist and short-story writer, he did not wish to suppress within himself the natural tendency of the artist to express himself in a style uniquely his own and to impregnate his text with his personal point of view. But as a scholar, his freedom of movement was severely compromised by the need to adhere to the conventions of documentation. Yet, he refused to believe a reconciliation of art and erudition impossible. In fact, he has defined a great biography as a work "où les deux soeurs ennemies Erudition et Poésie s'unissent pour recréer l'image."2 In the case of certain dramatically intense lives, he knew that they needed little embellishment to make them exciting; the more the biographer adhered to his documentation , the more readable would be these biographies. Michel Droit, writing of Maurois as a biographer, insists that documentation does not in itself necessarily stamp out art: "Sa documentation est scrupuleuse et tous les traits sont vérifiés. Il y a en effet du romanesque dans la plupart des existences , et le biographe peut satisfaire son besoin de romanesque—et le nôtre—s'il conserve à ses tableaux l'empreinte profonde de la réalité."3 !Pierre de Boisdeffre: "Balzac et Maurois," Les Nouvelles Littéraires (April 8, 1965), p. 5. 2AM, Preface to Robert Sencourt's La Vie de Meredith (Paris: Gallimard, 1931), p. 7. 3Michel Droit: André Maurois (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1953), p. 64. 46 RM-MLA Bulletin June 1967 We can study Maurois' conception of biography both by a close analysis of his countless statements on the subject diffused throughout his biographies and also by reading his various essays on the subject. To understand his views in their totality it is essential to move back and forth between his pure theories and his practical application of these theories. Maurois contended that theories could be formulated only after they emerged from the tests of application. This inveterate disciple of Alain considered no intellectual activity more hollow than that which creates theories in the vacuum of abstract thought and is divorced from action. Maurois has explicated and evaluated his own created works with exceptional objectivity and lucidity. We refer persons interested in his theoretical philosophy to Aspects de la Biographie, an early work based on the texts of his lectures on the subject of biography at Cambridge University in England (1928) as well as to his chapters on...