The Modernist Traveler: French Detours, 1900-1930 by Kimberley J. Healey (review)

1 48Women in French Studies Caffié reminds us that, according to Hazel Barnes, Beauvoir did not consider herselfa lesbian. "This conclusion is supported by the intensity and the length of her affair with Algren; her admission to Lamblin that she preferred men; and the fact that she never lived with a woman for a long period oftime . . ." (51). And here we confront the astonishing omission: the essay does not even broach what might be the most salient study of this collection, if it existed. None of the essays describes the 25-year relationship between Beauvoir and Sylvie Le Bon (de Beauvoir). Julienne-Caffié appears to deny it altogether. Hawthorne's own article, "Leçon de philo/Lesson in Love" covers the most ground and proceeds best from Beauvoir's texts. This fascinating study of teaching and seduction examines the long tradition of women writing in the gynaeceum. Again, Sylvie Le Bon goes entirely missing. Drawing on material first available only to her, Barbara Klaw in "Simone de Beauvoir andNelsonAlgren" focuses exclusively onthat relationship, showing how the Beauvoir and Algren described by Beauvoir are themselves fictions. Accepting them and their couple as constructs, the reader must create an unlikely "happy ending" to their story. Klaw studies Beauvoir's ambivalence, but she does not explore the person behind the Algren persona, perhaps because Beauvoir never supplied him. Richard Golsan's study, "Simone de Beauvoir on Henry de Montherlant," is notable for his history-based analysis ofone ofthe four male authors studied in the first volume of The Second Sex. Golsan wonders why Beauvoir did not examine right-wing male writers, such as Drieu La Rochelle, noting that Montherlant, as a homosexual/pederast, could hardly have represented the male attitudes and myths towards and about women that Beauvoir criticized. Golsan explains that her Hegelian approach nonetheless fits well with Montherlant's solipsistic egotism, one that depends on and derives from the denigration ofthe Other. "Beauvoir may well misread Montherlant on numerous occasions, but . . . she reads the cultural climate that produced many of his most important works with frightening precision" (165). This provocative, well-edited collection contains a general bibliography and a welcome index to all the essays. It begs for the continued pursuit of its own topic, boldly pioneered by Beauvoir herself. Mary Lawrence TestLos Angeles, CA Myrna Bell RochesterPalo Alto, CA Kimberley J. Healey. The Modernist Traveler: French Detours, 19001930 . Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Pp 175. ISBN: 0-8032-2412-5. Price unlisted. On ne peut voyager sans écrire—this seems to be the belief that binds together the group ofearly twentieth-century French travel writers Kimberley J. Healey considers in her book. What the selected writers have in common is that, although they claim to tell tales of travel, they ultimately tell tales of stasis and self-examination. Healey's main argument is that their texts about Book Reviews149 travel increasingly become texts about writing. For while the depiction ofthe picturesque was the main concern oftraditional travelogues, the primary goal ofthe travel narratives she analyzes has shifted to a questioning ofthe traveler's experience of the world. Traveling stimulated these writers to approach the act of writing in what we recognize today as a distinctly modernist mode. Discovering another version of one's self and of reality through writing and traveling, traveling-for-writing, is indeed a specifically modernist experience. In each ofthe four chapters that make up The Modernist Traveler, Healey organizes a rather diverse body of literature around one thematic element which is important both to the understanding of literary modernism and to texts about travel: self, time, space and the physical body. Chapter One is mainly devoted to Victor Segalen's narratives about China, Equipée and René Leys. Here Healey focuses on this writer's proclaimed search for theforeign other which ultimately results in his exoticizing of his own self. For Segalen, traveling to China appears to be mainly a means of encountering different versions of himself, so that his quest for the exotic ends up in a discovery of the self as other, the autre oíje est un autre. Chapter Two contains a perceptive analysis ofBlaise Cendrars' Prose du Transsybérien...