Abstract
The very incarnation of the Entente Cordiale, moving in the highest circles of British society, Maurois was a valued political as well as cultural mediator between England and France and was the recipient of many British honours. Equally, after his first visit to the USA in 1927, he became an active mediator between the US and France. Convinced of the crucial importance for France of good relations with America, he worked hard to present through books, newspaper and magazine articles, and stints of lecturing at US colleges and universities, a more favourable image of America than was then current in France and a more favourable image of France than was common in America.
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Notes
Roya, André Maurois, pp. 105–106. Roya goes on to explain why this is so: “In the 1900’s there were no children of proletarians in the French collège. From his military service, M. Maurois retained an impression of disillusionment. As for the War, in the course of which he might have rubbed up against the plebs, he spent it in the company of English officers.” “I have little knowledge of the common people” [“J’ai peu connu le peuple”], Maurois himself acknowledged (quoted by his successor at the Académie Française, Marcel Arland, in his Discours de Réception [Paris: Gallimard, 1969], p. 15).
Though he refers twice in his Memoirs to Mrs. Greville (the illegitimately born daughter of the Scottish brewery magnate William McEwan), Maurois does not mention either her fascist sympathies or her anti-Semitism, evidently suspended in his case; see The Crawford Papers: The Journal of David Lindsay, Twenty-Seventh Earl of Crawford and Tenth Earl of Balcarres, 1871–1940, during the Years 1892–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 550, entry for 9 November 1933; and Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930–1939 (London: Collins, 1966), pp. 265
Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), pp. 22
Chantiers américains (Paris: Gallimard, 1933); German trans. Peter Mendelssohn, Amerika: Neubau oder Chaos (Paris: Europäischer Merkur, 1933).
L’Amérique inattendue, p. 6. Cf. Georges Duhamel, America the Menace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), pp. 201–202
Memoirs 1885–1967, p. 290. Roger Martin du Gard tells of having heard from a cousin of his wife’s, who was present when Maurois spoke in Baltimore, that the lecture, “sad and courageous [...] deeply moved the audience” (Letter to Anne Heurgon-Desjardins of 25 July 1941, Correspondance générale [as in IV, note 36], vol. 8, p. 237). The writer Julien Green may have been present at the same lecture: “Got back to Baltimore on Tuesday and heard a lecture on France by Maurois. Poor lighting made him look like a corpse, but a corpse with tears running down his face. I wept myself as I listened to him explaining what caused the fall of his country” (Julien Green, Journal, vol. 3, 1940–1943 [Paris: Plon, 1946], 27 February 1941, pp. 70–71).
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© 2014 Lionel Gossman
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Gossman, L. (2014). Mediator between France and Britain, France and the US. In: André Maurois (1885–1967): Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Moderate. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137402707_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137402707_6
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