If Memory Serves: Memoirs of Sacha Guitry [Paperback]

Sacha Guitry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2005

This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 324 pages
• Publisher: Kessinger Publishing (May 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1417992336
• ISBN-13: 978-1417992331
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,621,404 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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4.0 out of 5 stars The Beggar, The Bottom Dealer, and The Grocer, August 15, 2010

By 

Don Reed "Don" (Cliffside Park NJ) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: If Memory Serves: Memoirs Of Sacha Guitry (Hardcover)

If Memory Serves, Memoirs of Sacha Guitry [1885-1957]; Doubleday Doran & Co., Inc. 1935; Kessinger Publishing's Rare Reprints, year unknown.

Cornelia Otis Skinner in her vibrant biography of Sarah Bernhardt ("Madam Sarah," 1967) recommended "If Memory Serves." What a nice surprise to be pointed in the right direction!

First, the republisher, Kessenger's, ought to get a standing ovation - the ink density & type size employed is superb. This costs money & cuts into profit margins, so please patronize their products in the future.

(If you think these factors are negligible, be my foolish guest. Waste your money on the 2007 Harper Perennial paperback, the criminal reprint of the revised "Letters of E.B. White." Its disgraceful tiny type, illegible density of ink & cheap, flimsy paper isn't even suitable as shredded hog pen absorbents.)

I wouldn't blindly rely on IMS for factual information - for instance, playwright Alfred Jarry died in 1907 at the age of 34, not "32."

And basic things are missing - such as a brief synopsis of Jarry's most famous work, "Ubi Roi" - without which, the significance of his life will mean little to those of us who weren't born in French theatres ("The story of a buffoon & his scheming wife as they weasel their way to the top. Jarry & his friends wrote the play as school boys as a way of ridiculing their physics teacher...presented in Paris in 1896..." Enid Nemy, NY Times, 03/24/89).

But Sacha tells tales charmingly & with wit:

"My grandfather & I were walking...one evening...a blind man sat on a folding stool, begging. Grandfather put his hand in his pocket & handed me four sous.

" `Give this to the poor chap.'

"I dropped the coins in the man's hat & rejoined my grandfather. We walked on & he said:

" `You ought to have touched your cap.'

" `To him?!'

" `Of course.'

" `Why?'

" `One should always do that when giving alms.'

"I said, `But not this one; he's blind.'

"Not bad; but my grandfather, who always had a rejoinder to everything, had a rather pretty one for me that day.'

" `He might be a fraud.' "

Since chronology is only a casual matter to the author, it is not known if this early lesson about not taking things at face value came before or after another incident - in which it was Sacha himself who was the bottom-dealer.

Kidnapped by his father after his parents were divorced & brought to St. Petersburg where Lucien Guitry then spent years as an actor, Sacha's formal schooling got off to a non-existent start.

Things didn't get much better in this respect after his return to Paris. Dumped in a succession of anarchic day-schools of dubious accreditation, one day, an inspiration hit.

"It was from this school that I escaped one day & ran to the family's greengrocer where I left an order, supposedly on behalf of my mother.

" `Please let me have four kilograms of sugar at 75 centimes the kilogram. ¼ kilogram of lentils at two francs the kilo' & so on, with additional orders for salt & flour.

" `Certainly, Mister Sacha,' said the grocer; & he wrote it all down.

" `How much will all that [cost]?'

"He told me it would [cost] 5 francs, 5 centimes. I thanked him & ran back to school, for I had just got him to do the problem we had been asked to solve that same morning."

Sacha presumed that the answer was correct & it was & he passed the quiz.

But what would have his grade had been - if not only the beggar could actually see, but also, if the grocer had had his thumb on the scale, overcharging for his sugar & lentils & salt & flour?

There goes the math quiz.

*****

A jarring thing to read - from A.J. Liebling's "World War II Writings" (Highly recommended; "Notes From The Kidnap House," p. 669):

"Clandestine newspapers [published during WWII in France]...take Gallic digs at Sacha Guitry, who seems to have carried over into real life his role in `The Story of the Cheat.' He, these publications say, enjoys such favor with the Germans that when another collaborationist movie producer not long ago made a film on the same subject as one of Guitry's, Guitry simply had the other fellow's film suppressed."

Note that these are anonymous & uncorroborated allegations, possibly motivated by reasons other than patriotism.

From editor Pete Hamill's Notes: "Guitry...wrote, directed, & starred in Le Roman d'un Tricheur (1936)."