Book Reviews

Book Review
Title: Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff
Author: Jean Findlay
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0374119270

They say hereditary talents sometimes skip a generation. In this case it skipped three or four generations. The subject of the biography is one of the most talented writers (albeit lesser known) of the twentieth century, CK Scott Moncrieff. He was the undisputed premier literary translator of the period, especially noted for his translations of Proust and Stendhal. The talented author of this biography is his great-great-niece, Jean Findlay.

Findlay tells a well-balanced thorough story of Scott Moncrieff’s short life (1889–1930). She reveals the pain and struggle behind Scott Moncrieff’s astounding achievements. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Scott Moncrieff’s Proust is a masterpiece in itself” (297). Scott Moncrieff’s lifetime overlapped with that of Proust, knew the times and understood the subtleties and depth of Proust better than subsequent translators and critics who would try their hand many years later. In fact, Proust himself reviewed and approved of Scott Moncrieff’s translation, giving it the ultimate recommendation, and definitive authority on the work. Findlay brilliantly fleshes out the subtleties of Scott Moncrieff’s translations. She brings us into the times and the mind of her ancestor in a fascinating case study of rare genius.

From his earliest years, Scott Moncrieff was a natural when it came to languages. For example, to get into Winchester (the best high school in England), he had four days of eight exams (half-day for each exam). He mastered the exams, and especially excelled in the Greek and Latin exams. This was not to graduate from high school, but to get in, at age 13. He had translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses with adult understanding (which he had memorized earlier in his life) (35). He ultimately graduated from university with degrees in Law and Literature with first-class honors.

With his intimate understanding of Proust and his milieu, Scott Moncrieff was able to translate the seven volumes of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in eight years. For comparison, in 2002, it took a new team of seven translators seven years of dedicated time to do the same task that Scott Moncrieff had done alone in eight. Further, during that same eight-year period, Scott Moncrieff also translated Stendhal, Pirandello, and kept up his other journalistic work. In one six-year period, he translated fifteen volumes, compiled a genealogy, and wrote thousands of articles and letters. To let those achievements sink in for a moment, one sees a once-in-a-century stratospheric mind that had no peers.

Findlay also brings Scott Moncrieff’s everyday habits to life with compelling detail. Being a member of the family, she had access to thousands of pages of diaries and letters whose contents are made public for the first time in this biography. Scott Moncrieff never had a home as an adult. He moved around between various locations in Great Britain, France, and Italy. He was a solitary worker, but a very sociable friend during his brief breaks from work. He ate his meals out. He breakfasted, lunched, and supped with friends, colleagues, family members, and many famous figures of the times. These stories alone offer a fascinating look at the early twentieth century and the well-known figures of the time.

Scott Moncrieff had a strong sense of family responsibility as well. He supported and paid for the education of nine nephews and nieces after his two brothers’ illness and death. His maturity was no doubt accelerated by his experiences fighting in World War I. Due to Scott Moncrieff’s law degree, he entered the army as an officer. He saw action at the First Battle of Ypres, and others. Findlay provides very detailed events and experiences of Scott Moncrieff in the war. He developed a deep sense of faith (including conversion to Catholicism in 1915) and camaraderie among soldiers, and he kept a strong positive attitude despite the horrors of prolonged trench warfare. He was injured several times–he received a permanent injury in one leg that caused a painful limp for the rest of his life. He was awarded the Military Cross, the 1914–15 Star, the Silver Badge, the British War Medal, and the Victory Medal (132).

After the war, Scott Moncrieff became a British spy. He joined Military Intelligence, liaising with MI5. The stated qualities that Scott Moncrieff possessed, which made him an ideal spy, were “sense of honour, courage, acumen, brains, audacity, and presence of mind” (210). He was assigned to the Office of Passports, covertly. There was an innocent community of English writers in Italy, so Scott Moncrieff’s journalism and being a professional translator, mingling with that expat community, constituted a perfect cover. Among other assignments, he monitored and reported on Mussolini’s naval and military activities. He stayed and worked as a British agent in Italy for eight years.

Jean Findlay’s biography gives us a window into a brilliant mind and a fascinating character that circulated in a highly charged period of history. In turn, Scott Moncrieff gives English speakers a window into the brilliance of Proust, Stendhal, Pirandello, and others. After a hundred years, Findlay brings her ancestor back to the fore and reminds us of this forceful and sublime figure. She does it with an aesthetic excellence that makes this biography a masterpiece of literature in its own right.

Book Review
Title: Flaubert: A Biography
Author: Herbert R. Lottman
Publisher: Little Brown & Co
Date: January 1, 1989
ISBN: 978-0316533423

This biography of Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) is a great story and Herbert Lottman is a great storyteller. Flaubert finished law school and then promptly forgot all about law and embarked on a literary life, becoming one of the greatest novelists of the nineteenth century.

The book chronicles the struggles and failures and illnesses that plagued Flaubert throughout his life. He labored with excruciating scrupulousness over every word and punctuation in his writing. That slow exacting process, combined with regular periods of illness when he couldn’t work at all, explain why Flaubert’s output was small in comparison with other novelists. His good friend and colleague Émile Zola, for example, published well over 20 major novels. Flaubert published about six major works (depending on who you ask): Madame Bovary, Salammbô, Sentimental Education, Temptation of Saint Anthony, Three Tales, and Bouvard et Pécuchet.

Flaubert’s closest literary friends, those he spent the most time with, and corresponded with the most, included Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Ivan Turgenev, Edmond de Goncourt, Jules de Goncourt, Théophile Gautier, and perhaps closest was George Sand. Flaubert was also close friends with a number of the French aristocracy, especially Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte, daughter of Napoleon’s brother Jérôme Bonaparte; and Prince Louis-Napoléon, the only child of Napoleon III, Emperor of France.

Given Flaubert’s august social circles, the story of Flaubert necessarily weaves in and out of larger Nineteenth-century French history. The political landscape becomes a complementary side story in the life of Flaubert. His movements and life conditions are very much affected by the 1830 July Revolution, Revolutions of 1848, Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Overthrow of Paris by the “Paris Commune” in 1871, among others.

Flaubert never married or “settled down,” but there were very special relationships that he cherished. These are touchingly shown throughout his biography, and how he navigated these amid his work and his extensive travels, and his mixed emotions and personality conflicts within himself—all of which played a rôle in his ever-troubled personal life.

Herbert Lottman produced a minor masterpiece of his own, in this compelling novelistic story of the life of Gustave Flaubert. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in literature, French history, or in simply reading good books.

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Also see: Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education.

Book Review
Title: Philip Roth: The Biography
Author: Blake Bailey
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st Edition (Hardcover)
Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0393240726

This biography of Philip Roth (19-March-1933 – 22-May-2018) presents a mix of Roth’s personal and literary life—with a more emphasis on the personal. In fact, my main criticism of the book is that it spends too much time belaboring the minute details of Roth’s personal-life miseries and disasters. The prolonged jeremiads and relentless physical and emotional sufferings become painfully tedious too often. Cutting some of that out, the book might’ve been trimmed to about 600 pages, instead of the lengthy 807 pages (not counting notes, appendix, etc.). On the other hand, that might not give the full picture of Roth’s life.

Roth enjoyed a stable, secure, and relatively happy childhood in Newark, New Jersey (Weequahic neighborhood), with family summers at the Jersey shore. He had a healthy academic life, earning a B.A. magna cum laude in English (elected to Phi Beta Kappa) at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, and, with a scholarship, earned an M.A. in English literature at the University of Chicago. But in adulthood, the happiness mostly ended.

Roth made poor choices in both of his marriages (self admission), and lived much of his life in miserable relationships. But not all: part of his life, mercifully, was blessed with some very happy non-marital relationships. The author spends a lot of time detailing arguments and other conversations, many verbatim (based on various journals and interviews), and many, in my opinion, not worth recording.

Roth loved the bustling city life in his New York City apartment, although to ensure quiet when he wanted it, he bought up the apartments all around him, beside, above, and below (p. 704). He also liked the less hectic life in his Connecticut getaway, where he hosted social gatherings from his extensive list of friends. The social gatherings at these and other locations are also described in some detail, which, in this case, really added color to the book. The attendees constitute a Who’s Who of literary lights and other celebrities of the time.

Roth’s early and primary literary influences were Henry James, William Faulkner, Gustav Flaubert, Sherwood Anderson, and Joseph Conrad. Later he revered novelists Saul Bellow and John Updike more than any others. Roth also greatly respected, and was friends with, William Styron. The author offers some interesting tidbits such as, according to Styron, Roth is partly the model for the character Nathan Landau in Styron’s bestseller, Sophie’s Choice (p. 186), which was published in 1979.

The author does a good job reporting on the period during which Roth rose from obscurity to fame. Roth’s first really successful writing was the short story “The Conversion of the Jews” (written in 1958, published in the Paris Review in 1959). Roth’s second successful piece of writing was his novella Goodbye, Columbus (1959), which suddenly catapulted him to literary renown. The novella won the National Book Award—Roth was the youngest author ever to win that award. Saul Bellow declared Roth a virtuoso at age 26 (p. 171).

Roth experienced repeated acclaim with his steady outflow of successful novels and other writings, finally numbering thirty-one books during his lifetime. The author emphasizes Roth’s monk-like daily writing discipline, which sharpened his expertise as well as enabled his prolific output. Roth’s final novel, Nemesis (2010), was lauded as a masterpiece and “a triumphant return to high form” (p. 748). Roth was 77 years old.

The author highlights this striking accomplishment—Roth is unique in that he wrote so many books universally acclaimed as masterpieces, and unique in that two of his greatest novels were 50 years apart: Goodbye, Columbus and Nemesis. No other novelist comes close to this accomplishment, consistency, and longevity.

As for the twenty-nine books in-between, posterity has dubbed most of them major or minor masterpieces, with few exceptions. The author shows us Roth’s varying attitudes towards the critical responses. He tried not to read them, but often couldn’t resist and gave in. Other times he was quick to find the first review being published. A common theme in all the reviews throughout his lifetime was that the reviewers completely failed to understand the book, whether the review was good or bad.

Roth accumulated a lion’s share of literary awards as well. American Pastoral, for example, won the Pulitzer prize in 1998. Other books garnered the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Roth was often a repeat-winner—many books won the same awards over time, and there was a real diversity of awards. The Human Stain, for example, won the United Kingdom’s WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year, as well as two awards from France: the Prix Médicis Étranger, and the Commander of the Legion of Honor; in 2011, the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement (approx. $80,000); and in 2012, the Prince of Asturias Award for literature and the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction. He won the Gold Medal In Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001.

Many major universities bestowed honorary doctorates upon Roth, including Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Columbia, and Rutgers, among others. Many of Roth’s novels became Hollywood movies. The author notes that Roth viewed the movie version of Goodbye, Columbus as the best movie ever made of his books (p. 783).

The author brings out Roth’s disillusionment with the steady deterioration of the reading public over the decades, as television made people read less and less. The general population’s march towards illiteracy had an impact on his readership. He noted that, among writers, he and Updike were “the last pre-television generation” (p. 334). As television implacably dumbed down the populous, there followed “the inevitable decline of ‘people who read serious books seriously and consistently’” … “Someday soon, said Roth, reading novels would be as ‘cultic’ an activity as reading ‘Latin poetry.’” (p. 751).

I definitely recommend the book. Despite the book’s flaws, Philip Roth is an important literary figure and this book gives us greater understanding of his work. I recommend the book for anyone interested in literature, writers in general, or anyone interested in twentieth-century history.