The Ghosts: 4, Andre Maurois

Introduction. In 1941 inThe Lion and the Unicorn; Socialism and the English Genius, Orwell wrote in Part II Shopkeepers at War that:

Nothing was more desolating at the beginning of this war than the way in which the whole of the older generation conspired to pretend that it was the war of 1914-1918 over again. All the old duds were back on the job, twenty years older with the skull plainer in their faces. Ian Hay was cheering up the troops, Belloc was writing articles on strategy, Maurois doing broadcasts, Bairnsfather drawing cartoons. It was like a tea party of ghosts.

These men Orwell named were well known to his readers. They are largely forgotten today. I have already looked at Bruce Bairnsfather, Ian Hay, and Hilaire Belloc. Here I look at Andre Maurois.

Orwell and Maurois. Facing unpleasant Facts. George Orwell first mentioned Maurois in a 27 July 1939 New English Weekly review of Stendhal, a book by Professor Frederick Charles Green. ‘Stendhal’ was the pen-name of the French novelist Marie Henri Beyle.

George Orwell wrote:

Professor Green has avoided the Maurois touch and ignored the picturesqueness of Stendhal’s background – the Revolution, Napoleon etc. He sticks to his subject and when he is doubtful about the facts he says so.

Thus Orwell praised Green for sticking to his subject and avoiding unnecessary padding about its background, implicitly criticising Maurois.

A Patriot After All. George Orwell next mentioned Maurois in the passage I quoted first. I have found no more references to Maurois in the index to Orwell’s Collected Works. So who was Maurois? For Maurois clearly meant something to Orwell that was perhaps something he did not share with his fellow Britons. Britons would have known Maurois for two things: firstly, his work towards the Anglo-French entente of the First World War, in which he created the figure of ‘Colonel Bramble’, a personification of all he found best in the British officers on the Western Front. Then, secondly, twenty years later, Maurois was forced into public awareness: for his was the book chosen to the be the first ever published as a Penguin paperback. His name would have been everywhere from station book stalls to displays in High Street department store.

Early Life. Andre Maurois was born Emile Solomon Wilhelm Herzog in Elbeuf, an industrial town eleven miles south of Rouen in Normandy. His parents were Ernest Herzog, a Jewish woollen mill owner; and Alice Levy Rueff.

This family had fled Alsace-Lorraine during the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War. The Germans annexed this province after their victory; only one more change to a province which had changed hands many times over the centuries – French and German accounts of this war should not be read in isolation. The Herzogs had owned an Alsace textile mill and when they left and came to France they brought their workforce with them. For doing this French government made Maurois’s paternal grandfather a member of the Legion of Honour for saving a French industry.

Andre Maurois was educated at the Lycee Pierre Corneille in Rouen, did his military service and despite literary ambitions became a director of his family’s woollen mills. In 1912 he married Jeanne-Marie Wanda de Szymkiewicz, a Polish aristocrat who had studied at Oxford. They were to have two sons and a daughter.

In 1914 Maurois was called up and returned to the French army. He was appointed liaison officer first to the 9^th Scottish Division the first Territorial Division to go to the Western Front, and then at British General Headquarters. His wife had a nervous breakdown in 1918.

The Writer. In 1918 Grasset*1 of Paris published Maurois’s book Les Silences de Colonel Bramble which included a French translation of Kipling’s poem If. Its English translation The Silence of Colonel Bramble came in 1919 from the Bodley Head. Thurfrida Wake, the oldest daughter of Sir Hereward Wake a 12^th Baronet, translated its text while Emilie Jackson née Bescky (whose penname was Mrs Wilfred S. Jackson. (Wilfred Scarborough Jackson was her husband)) translated its verse

This book is a penetrating study of the British officer from a French viewpoint and sold well in both countries.

During the next forty nine years fifty seven more of Maurois’s novels and biographies and at least thirty six of his short stories were published. Grassset of Paris published Maurois’s novel Ni Angle ni bete (Neither Angel nor Beast) a fictionalised life of Shelley in 1919. It flopped.

Continuing his use of military memoir, in 1922 Grasset published Maurois’s Les Discours du docteur O’ Grady, a study of a Royal Army Medical Corps doctor. Bodley Head published an English translation in 1965.

Andre Maurois’s Ariel, ou La Vie De Shelley a biography of Shelley (Grasset, Paris, 1923) was translated by Ella D’Arcy*2 and published by Daniel Appleton and Co. of New York in 1924. It sold well in France, Britain and the USA. Though it was its appearance as a Penguin paperback in 1935 which made it seminal.

Jeanne-Marie Maurois died of sepsis in 1924. Andre Maurois’s life of Byron Lord Byron et le demon de la tendresse was published in French in 1925. (James Edward) Hamish Miles translated it into English and Jonathan Cape published it in Britain in 1930.

In 1926 Maurois married Marie Andree Huguette Simone de Caillavet*3, a writer and model born in 1894. This was her second marriage, her first marriage to George Stoicescu, a Romanian diplomat, having broken down. There were tensions in this marriage because Andre Maurois still grieved for his first wife. His second wife adored him and his writing, however, gave him a daughter and did much valuable research for him. She also gave him valuable social connections.

Maurois remained a director of his family’s woollen mills until 1926 when he retired from this position but retained a financial interest in them. That year his semi-auto-biographical novel Bernard Quesnay was published. It was about a young man torn by the dilemma of helping run his family business or pursuing his literary ambitions. His work, though, was too obviously auto-biographical or fantasies and science fiction which to quote his Times obituary dissipate their ingenuity in the thinnest of intellectual airs. His great strength was as a biographer of historical or modern British and French people. He usually spoke well of his subjects.

• In 1927 Gallimard*4 of Paris published Maurois’s La vie de Disraeli about the nineteenth century British Conservative Prime Minister; and Bodley Head of London published Hamish Miles’s English translation. There were accusations of plagiarism. In 1927 Grasset published Maurois’s un essai sur Dickens, a study of Charles Dickens; and Maurois’s Etudes Anglaise: Dickens, Walpole, Ruskin et Wilde.
• Plon*5 of Paris published Maurois’s Lyautey in 1931.Marshal Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey,a French general, defeated the Riff rebels in Morocco after they had defeated the Spanish.  Hamish Miles translated it into English and Bodley Head published this translation in 1931. 
• Grasset published Maurois’s life of Chateaubriand in 1932. Francois Rene Vicomte de Chateaubriand was a late eighteenth/early nineteenth century French soldier, diplomat, writer, and womaniser.  Vera (Sylvia Mathieson) Fraser translated it into English. In 1938 Jonathan Cape published it in Britain and Harper Brothers did so in the USA.
• Maurois’s life of Voltaire was published in Britain in 1932 but in France it had to wait until 1935. (Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire) the eighteenth century French enlightenment philosopher remains controversial. His History d’angleterre was published in 1937 in France and in translation by Jonathan Cape in London as A History of England.

Maurois was in demand as a lecturer. In 1928 he gave a lecture series at Cambridge on Aspects of Biography. He also lectured in the USA Switzerland and elsewhere. In 1938 he was made a member of the Academie Francaise. One of those who supported his application was Marshal Henri Philippe Omer Petain. In 1938 the British government gave Maurois an honorary knighthood.

The Second World War. After the Second World War broke out Andre Maurois was attached to the British Expeditionary Force’s Headquarters as a French eyewitness. He returned to Britain after Dunkirk as France collapsed and broadcast on the radio from London. He entreated the French to fight on and despaired of how France had collapsed.

After France capitulated Maurois moved to the USA, fearing a German invasion of Britain. In 1940 Harper Brothers of New York published his Tragedy in France: Why France fell. Denver Lindley*6, an American, translated it and extracts from it were published in the Daily Telegraph in 1941. Denver Lindley also translated works by other writers including the German First World War soldier Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.

In 1943 John Lane and Bodley Head published Maurois’s autobiography Call No Man Happy. There is a proverb Call No Man Happy until he is dead. Denver Lindley and his first wife Jane Hastings Lindley née Hickok translated it. It included a thank you to Petain for helping get Maurois elected to the Academie Francaise which did not endear Maurois to the French public.

Andre Maurois had a point about Petain. If Petain had died in 1939 he would have been remembered as the man who saved France at Verdun in the First World War. As President of Vichy France his name became a synonym for treason.

Andre Maurois left New York for Algeria in late 1943 after Operation Torch. He served with the Free French for the rest of the war on the staff of General (Henri Honore) Giraud, a colleague and rival of General Charles (Andre Joseph Marie) de Gaulle.

Post War Writing. In 1947 Maurois officially changed his name to Andre Maurois, which had been his pen-name since he began writing. In 1947 Harper Brothers of New York published Maurois’s, From my Journal: The record of a year of Adjustment for an Individual and the World translated by Joan Charles; and Dominique Wapler of Paris published Maurois’s Histoirie de la France. Dominique Francois Carles Wapler a French publisher and politician founded the publishing house of Dominique Wapler.

• Hachette published Maurois’s A La Recherche de Marcel Proust in 1949. Gerard Hopkins translated it into English and Harper of New York published it in English as Proust: Portrait of a Genius in 1950. Gerard Hopkins, a Catholic, who died in 1961 aged sixty eight, also translated works by Francois Mauriac a modern French novelist and dramatist. In 1950 Falcon Press of London published Maurois’s My American Journal.
• Andre Maurois’s Leila: ou la vie de George Sand (Hachette, in Paris, 1952) was translated into English by Gerard Hopkins (Jonathan Cape, London, 1952). Aurore Lucile Dupin whose penname was George Sand was France’s leading nineteenth century woman novelist and was as famous for her private life as her writing. 
• In 1953 Collins of London published Maurois’s book Cecil Rhodes as part of its Brief Lives series. Cecil John Rhodes was one of the creators of the British Empire. 
• In 1954 Hachette published Maurois’s Olympio: ou la vie de Victor Hugo. Gerard Hopkins translated it into English as Olympio: The Turbulent life of Victor Hugo (Harper Brothers, New York, 1956). Victor Marie Hugo a great French writer of Les Miserables fame was born in 1802 and died in 1885. 
• Hachette published Andre Maurois’s Les Titans ou les trois Dumas in Paris in 1957. Gerard Hopkins translated it into English and Harper published Titans: A Three Generation Biography of the Dumas in 1957. Alexandre Dumas was a prolific nineteenth century French novelist of The Three Musketeers fame. His father was a French general in the French Revolutionary armies but his mother was of African descent. Alexandre Dumas’s son Alexandre Dumas junior was a nineteenth century French playwright.
•  In 1958 Hachette published Maurois’s La Vie de Sir Alexander Fleming, the scientist who had discovered penicillin. To help research it Maurois took a short course in bacteriology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Gerard Hopkins translated it into English and in 1958 Edward Payson Dutton of New York, published this translation with an introduction by Professor Robert Cruickshank, a bacteriologist and colleague of Fleming. It did not sell well.
• Hachette published Maurois’s Adrienne ou La vie de Mme de La Fayette in 1960. The Comtesse de Marie Madeleine Ploche de la Vergue La Fayette was a seventeenth century French woman novelist. Her 1678 novel La Princesse de Cleves deals with a married woman renouncing a love affair.
• In 1965 Hachette published Maurois’s Promothee ou la Vie de Balzac. Norman George Denny a writer and translator translated it into English. In 1965 Bodley Head of London and Harper and Row of New York published it as Prometheus: The Life of Balzac. Honore de Balzac was an early nineteenth century French novelist.
• A collection of Maurois’s many short stories was translated by Adrienne Foulke. Washington Square Press of New York published it in 1967 as The Collected Short Stories of Andre Maurois.

Andre Maurois died in a Paris hospital on Monday 9 October 1967, aged eighty two, a fortnight after an operation to remove an intestinal obstruction. He was survived by his second wife Simone de Caillavet who died on 26 December 1968, aged seventy four; and by three of his four children. Andre and Simone Maurois are buried in the old cemetery of Neuilly-sur-Seine, the wealthiest residential Paris suburb.

Posthumous Reputation. Denver Lindley translated Andre Maurois’s Memoirs 1885-1967. They were published in 1970 (Bodley Head, London; and Cass Canfield Books, New York). Andre Maurois is little remembered today except by specialist literary historians.

Conclusion. All the four men Orwell called ghosts outlived him. He is better known than them. Yet the reasons why he is still well known are probably ones he would not like.

Bruce Bairnsfather, Hilaire Belloc and Ian Hay did act as if 1939 was 1914 all over again and did what they previously did, though what else could they do? It was unfair to accuse Maurois of this. He gave radio broadcasts in the Second World War but he had not done so in the First World War – though only because radio was then too primitive for this.

• 1. Grassett is a French publishing house. Bernard Grasset founded it in 1907. It is now part of a conglomerate. Its authors have included Marcel Proust and many other distinguished French writers.
• 2. Ella d’Arcy was the penname of Constance Eleanor Mary Byrne D’Arcy a short story writer and translator.
• 3. Simone de Calliavet’s parents were the playwright Gaston Arman de Caillavet and the actress Jeanne de Caillavet nee Pouquet whose mother Leontine Lippmann was Anatole France’s muse and mistress. Andre Maurois and Simone de Calliavet married at the chateau owned by her parents.
• 4.  Gaston Gallimard founded Gallimard in 1911. It is still majority family owned but is associated with a larger publishing group.
• 5.  Plon was foundied by Henri Plon in 1852. It is now part of a conglomerate.
• 6.  Denver Lindley’s maternal grandfather General James William Denver an American soldier and politician served in the Mexican War and the American Civil War. Denver, Colorado, is named after him.