Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort: A Novel [Hardcover]

Roger Martin du Gard (Author), Timothy Crouse (Translator), Luc Brebion (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 28, 1999

A literary event: the long-awaited translation of one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century fiction.

Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is Roger Martin du Gard's magnum opus, the crowning achievement of a career that included the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937.

Written over the final eighteen years of his life and intended to be read only posthumously, this tremendous creation sprang from the writer's unflinching examination of the conundrum of our moral ambivalence: why, knowing what is right, do people do wrong? Martin du Gard's complex response constitutes one of the most devastating critiques of human behavior ever produced.

The author casts his reflections in the form of a memoir written by Bertrand de Maumort, an aristocrat, a soldier, an intellectual -- ostensibly the very flower of European culture at its zenith. Born in 1870, Maumort grows up in a ch&3226;teau where a series of enlightened tutors tend to his education. Later, while preparing to enter the French military academy, he lives with his Uncle Eric, a powerful academic whose Sunday at-homes attract such luminaries as Renan, Turgenev, Daudet, and Pasteur. Keenly aware of his advantages, Maumort aspires to self-knowledge and a transcendent objectivity in his relations with the world. But as he describes his progress through life -- his early childhood, his experiences in the sexual hothouse of a Catholic boarding school, his affair with the beautiful Creole Doudou, his failed marriage to a sweet but adamantly conventional bourgeoise, his service in Morocco under the legendary colonialist General Lyautey, his participation in the First World War, and the occupation of his beloved ch&3226;teau by German troops in the Second -- he unwittingly betrays an underside: his prejudices, self-deceptions, and moral lapses. Through his portrayal of Maumort and a fascinating array of secondary characters, Martin du Gard dissects mankind in general, and calls into question whether true civilization, much less human progress, exists at all. The result is a work of extraordinary honesty, combining the sweep of his acknowledged master Tolstoy, the penetrating analysis of Proust, and the speculative profundity of Montaigne.

Left unfinished at the time of the author's death, Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort did not appear in print until 1983, when a definitive edition was established in French.  Now, after seven years of preparation, Martin du Gard's splendid accomplishment, destined to be recognized as one of the summits of modern literature, is available to readers in this superb English translation.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Roger Martin du Gard is a member of a small, fairly exclusive club: obscurities who have won the Nobel Prize. The French author, who switched from paleography to fiction in his early 20s, was awarded literature's ultimate gold star in 1937, largely on the strength of a multivolume family saga called The Thibaults. But du Gard's magnum opus, which he was still working on when he died in 1958, is Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort. This unfinished epic presents itself as the fictional memoir of the eponymous colonel, who is born into privilege in 1870 and dies some 80 years later, having only intermittently achieved the sort of honor he craves. Weighing in at nearly 800 pages, Maumort's story is an exhaustively detailed portrait of the class that shielded him, the women who tempted him, the teachers who influenced him, and--last but not least--the desires that overcame him.

For readers familiar with the period and place, this is an invaluable document. For others, Maumort's "memoir" offers more formidable challenges: charged up with Proustian ambitions, du Gard has none of Proust's poetry or hypnotic grace. To put it another way, Proust wrote as if he were holding back a flood, while Maumort's creator seems rigidly in control at all times:

It was quite foolish of me, when I began, to want to get away from chronological order. I imagined that this constraint might spoil my pleasure. This showed a poor knowledge of myself. I have too much rigor in my brain to escape from logical order, and it is in their historical sequence that past events quite naturally come back into my mind. Which, besides, does not in any way imply that I henceforth deny myself unchronological digressions. No set positions, no preconceived discipline: I let my pen run on according to the wishes of my fancy. But the fancy of an old rationalist is less capricious than I had imagined...

To be sure, the old rationalist does have his charms. But by part 4, the book begins to fall apart, hovering between form and formlessness in a manner that's (unintentionally) quite interesting. Clearly du Gard intended for the narrative to shift as Maumort grew older--but he was growing older too, and running out of time. In the end both the author and his creation fade out into an assemblage of notes, shorthand episodes, and supplementary meditations. As du Gard himself wrote of Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, "It is a work that can grow and be perfected indefinitely: a work that will never be finished for me, and that, however, may at any moment be interrupted by my death." Here, perhaps, lies the novel's ultimate pathos: both the hero and the text strive after eternity, but are always utterly dependent on the transitory world. --Emily White

From Publishers Weekly

Although a Nobel Prize winner in 1937, Martin du Gard is largely unrecognized in America, but this last, unfinished novel, masterfully translated, should lift the late novelist out of stateside obscurity. The story begins in 1940, when a 70-year-old military officer, Bertrand de Maumort, begins his memoirs, evoking the belle ?poque France of his youth, and offering a kind of personal resistance to the encroaching Nazis. Bertrand's mother died in childbirth, and he was raised by his father, a laconic military officer who presided over his rural French estate with cold hauteur. Young Bertrand is close to his sister, Henriette, and to his governesses, but when his sickly, debauched cousin, Guy, arrives, the innocent youth is introduced to the obsessions of sex. Guy plays a game of escalating sexual teasing with a tutor, who has pederastic inclinations that later lead to his suicide; the unfortunate Guy dies shortly after his flirtation with the tutor. De Maumort's painstaking analysis of his earliest erotic feelings and his concern throughout with the sexual lives of his contemporaries are strongly reminiscent of Proust. Bertrand goes to boarding school, and then to the Sorbonne, ostensibly to get into Saint-Cyr, the military academy. He mingles with the intellectuals in the circle around his uncle, a famous sociologist, and his wife. At the halfway point of this massive book, the protagonist is 19, embarking on his first love affair, with C?lie, an older woman from Martinique. The second half of the narrative consists of fragments, accompanied by research notes and commentary by scholars and the author, sketching the proposed trajectory of Bertrand in the colonial war in Morocco, and during the Dreyfus period in France. This novel provides a panoramic view of the French bourgeoisie and richly details the intellectual, sexual and emotional development of a thoughtful and winning hero; the incompleteness of Bertrand's story only heightens the appeal of this complex character. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 778 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (December 28, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067943397X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679433972
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.7 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,260,195 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Real Treasure, February 6, 2000

By 

Jack Mcguill (Westminster, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book, brilliantly translated, is a treasure of treasures. Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities," from an ironic, intellectual and dispassionate viewpoint, called into question a broad range of our unconscious conventional assumptions about society and reality. "Remembrance of Things Past" brought personal experience under the lens of Marcel Proust's delicate and evocative aesthetic microscope--again, from the point of view of a detached observer. Roger Martin du Gard, using Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort as his vehicle, is the ultimate participant in life and his examinations and judgments of his actions are honest and unsparing. Reading "Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort", narrated with elegance and sobriety, was for me a cataclysmic, relentless and successful assault on many of the complacent assumptions about my "sense of self". The fortitude required of the reader to remain open to Maumort's(du Gard's) courageous exploration of the totality of his own life is repaid many times over. This is not a novel in any conventional sense. It is an experience.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely Riveting, January 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort: A Novel (Hardcover)

A great book. This engrossing fictional memoir spans the time from the idyll of rural France in the late nineteenth century to the brilliant salons of fin-de-siecle Paris to the horrors of two world wars, probably the greatest period of change in the history of mankind. The witness to this epoch and to his own internal and external development is the narrator, Lt.-Col. de Maumort. He has the best opportunities and teachers his era can offer, and he strives to evolve and to follow his conscience in a world in which conscience matters little. (The exploration of the step-by-step justification of fascism provided to Maumort by occupying Nazi officers, also men of education and cultivation, is a novel in itself, and unlike any other representation of the subject of how seemingly decent people rationalize evil). The story has a wonderful momentum. Unlike most memoirs, fictional and otherwise, which tend always to be self-serving, this one returns again and again to the truth, baring all of the failures, self-betrayals, and contradictions of a life. No wonder Martin du Gard didn't want this to appear in his lifetime. Though the book on the surface appears to be the recollections of a military man walled up in his library while German soldiers occupy his estate in northern France, in fact it's a universal testament about what it is to be human--the best of contemporary fiction, in which every moment comes alive. The translation is superb--far more accurate, literary, and sensitive than the sometimes muddled one of the new Modern Library edition of "The Charterhouse of Parma." This is a book to treasure and reread. The "Black Box" section at the end is an extraodinary bonus: the author, a man apparently very like Maumort, in dialogue with himself through a series of memorable apercus.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunningly Contemporary, February 28, 2000

By 

PJ Corkery - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort: A Novel (Hardcover)

Timothy Crouse has always had an eye for the telling story that's right under everyone's nose, but which most everyone else misses. His book "The Boys on the Bus" was the first not only to notice the enormous power of the press in a presidential campaign but also candidly to describe its operations.

His journalism over the years has been marked by a stubborn willingness to describe contradictions and unfairness, bringing a clear Orwellian eye to an examination of the social and political conventions by which we live and would just as soon forget. Yet he has always been among the most entertaining and fluent of writers, successfully tackling many genres.

His update of the libretto to Cole Porter's musical "Anything Goes" matched that 1920s show with the madcap spirit of the `80s, and ran for years in New York.

When, lately, the word trickled out that for his latest project Crouse was engaged in translating a massive, 60 year old French novel, by an obscure (to Americans) Nobel Prize winner that dealt in detail with French life in the 19th century, readers wondered what was with this chronicler of our own times and spirit.

Trust Crouse, however, to find the contemporary in what everyone else thought of as antique. The book, "Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort" (Knopf), written by Roger Martin Du Gard, is now out in a fluent, companionable translation done jointly by Crouse, and his collaborator, Luc Brebion Ph.D.

Brebion himself is a distinguished, Berkeley-based, writer, translator and lecturer on aesthetics

As an example of the translators' art, Brebion and Crouse have produced a model. The text flows easily and persuasively; the notes are few and unobtrusive; the narrative voice is candid and companionable. In age when most writers are writing books designed to be read in 10 minute spurts, Brebion and Crouse offer a text that inveigles the reader into a richer, more rewarding reading experience. The ten minutes you have before bed for reading, quickly becomes with "Maumort" thirty, thirty minutes become forty-five.

Ostensibly the memoir, written as the Nazis invade France in 1940, by a retired French officer of his life in the previous 80 years, "Maumort" is a surprisingly frank and insightful account of social, family, political, intellectual, and sexual manners.

It may indeed have been too frank - the author, Martin du Gard, who died in 1958 before he could finish the work, had, at any rate, ordered its publication to be posthumous.

One of the most modern portraits is of a single woman, who adopts a child, only to be disappointed when the adopted child fails to prove to be brilliant. The consequences are horrible as the mother withdraws from the adopted daughter. As Martin duGard writes, "In fact, she was not satisfied with loving the girl, she wanted to be proud of her as well, wanted her affection to be, as it were, justified by the child's exceptional qualities." This novella, "The Story of Henriette," sounds an eerie current note as one listens to contemporary parents measure their children's worth primarily in terms of schools, and tests.

Written with enormous sympathy for the plight of each of its characters, "Maumort" nonetheless posits that much human behavior is situational, not innate. As Americans, these days, feel more and more that they are born into tribes, some may find this view controversial, others, objecting to the reduction of personality to traits, may find it welcome. It is an insanely contemporary discussion.

Martin du Gard's detailed portraits of marriages will leave readers' jaws agape as they see themselves in the lives of these early 20th century Parisian couples.

And as baby-boomers find themselves in small families, wondering about old age, Martin du Gard's assessment of the failures and strong points of large families, and on the emotional life of the aging, is vivid and apposite.

"Maumort" is one of the first novels in which there is a serious, modern treatment of gay themes. A subsection of the novel, entitled "The Drowning", an account of a tragic obsession between a schoolteacher-soldier and a baker's apprentice, rivals Melville's "Billy Budd" as a depiction of the high cost that is paid when societal strictures cross passion, drowning not only happiness, but also courage.

Not the least of the book's valuables, is the vocabulary Martin du Gard - and here the translation work of Brebion and Crouse is at its most pellucid - gives to the evanescent moments when a relationship shifts and suddenly redefines itself.

Although Martin du Gard was unable to finish his portraits of French military leaders, his panorama of Parisian intellectual life is rich. Again, while these portraits are rooted in a long gone age, they are of more than antiquarian interest: Here is the academic who, beguiled by the media scene, never writes anything important. Here is the blustering ideologue who has nothing to say, but says it about everything. There, the trust-fund baby, rendered impotent by an addiction to comfort, who nonetheless considers himself part of the great world of affairs.

His sketches of French military and political leaders also resonate deeply. As I read them, I found myself thinking, "that's as apt a description of Bill Clinton [or George W. Bush, or Al Gore, or Bill Bennett, say] as I've ever read.

So Brebion and Crouse have pulled from history, a novel valuable not only for its description of olden days, but primarily for its uncanny, and needed, articulation of the people, mores, and manners of our own day.

Part and parcel of the book is a section containing Martin du Gard's notes and files. These "Black Box files" offer a fascinating insight into an author struggling with, and conquering, problems of narrative. A boon for writers.