Correspondance littéraire by Friedrich Melchior Grimm Ulla KölvingMélinda Carón

Abstract

MLR, .,   Gallagher argues in her introduction, the works chosen have been those oriented towards the Anglo-Saxon world. is justifies Gallagher’s translation of Hiver caraïbe,whichgivesusasenseofMorandasindefatigablecosmopolitanglobetrotter. First published in , Caribbean Winter remassages notes from two journeys to the Caribbean and America made two years before. With Morand we cross the Atlantic: ‘Flying fish. e ship slows down, inching forward in a gelatinous light that is occasionally broken by a dorsal flash of shark. e walls of my cabin creak like a stove over-filled with fuel’ (p. ). We land at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, and very soon may be made uncomfortable by Morand’s outlook: ‘It is quite obvious that all the Negroes here have the vote. ey are wearing the stony, hostile and malevolent expressions of people set to nurse their bad humour for another four years’ (p. ). ere follow Port of Spain, Venezuela, Curaçao, Haiti, Cuba, then a magnificent coda devoted to Mexico and southern California. In his elliptical and allusive style, Morand remarks on people, politics, landscape, literature, and art. Morand is obsessed with racial and national difference, and the Caribbean crucible is a perfect environment for him to explore. What haunts him is the threat of métissage and the destruction of the racial ecology he seeks to protect: ‘Black and white are both beautiful; what’s ugly is grey’ (p. ). As Gallagher points out, in this age of trigger warnings, the world of Morand is a distinctly unsafe space. On the other hand, Paul Morand, with his brittle European arrogance and adumbrations of mass migration and global miscegenation, could be considered a postcolonial studies wet dream. Gallagher makes some very astute points. First, Morand seems attracted to a form of American Sublime, which explains why, on arriving on the islands, he immediately makes for the highlands, and devotes so many pages to Mexico and the Apache Trail, making no mention of the Deep South he travelled through in . What is also striking is how the synchronic staccato of Morand’s travelogue occludes the history of slavery. On the other hand, Gallagher suggests that, in his descriptions of the vestiges of Aztec and Maya civilizations, he is, unconsciously, making us think of other Caribbean peoples destroyed by the arrival of the white man. ere are a couple of factual errors in Gallagher’s introduction: Ouvert la nuit is not set in London—in fact, the only story touching British soil is ‘La Nuit écossaise ’; Morand wrote about the Napoleonic occupation of Spain and not the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, such quibbles apart, this book is beautifully written and translated, helpfully annotated, and gloriously ‘incorrect’. U  S A G B Correspondance littéraire. By F M G. Ed. by U K. Vol. : . Ed. by M C. Fernay-Voltaire: Centre International d’Étude du e Siècle. . lxxx+ pp. €. ISBN ––––. If the Correspondance littéraire for  ended with Grimm expressing his astonishment at the talent of the seven-year-old Mozart, he began , despite suffering  Reviews from a fever, by offering significant support for the Mozart family until their departure from Paris in April. While we are indebted to the editor Mélinda Caron for this information, which is not mentioned in the Correspondance itself, this almost prophetic support of the cosmopolitan music of the future provides a striking contrast to Grimm’s negative reaction to the death of Rameau in September. Grimm was, of course, never a supporter of French music, but, with hindsight, the vehemence of his reaction to the demise of the man who would now be regarded as one of the two greatest French composers of the century makes for fascinating reading. ere is important writing on the plastic arts too, and if the enthusiastic article in the second issue for August concerning Drouais’s famous portrait of Madame de Pompadour is relatively brief, the lengthy essay reviewing the criticisms of Soufflot’s design for the church of Sainte Geneviève in the second issue for October leads to further extended essays in subsequent issues, first on the history of ecclesiastical architecture, then on the history of Christianity itself. Like ,  was a relatively poor year...