Transition to Vichy: The Case of Georges Pelorson

Abstract

On the evidence of the number of entries in the Bibliothèque nationale catalogue, Georges Belmont must rank among the most prolific writers of the post-war period: 156 to date (September 1998) in Opale, the online catalogue, to which one must add 13 in the 1960-1969 Catalogue des imprimés and ten more in the old pre-1960 card catalogue. This impressive output includes five novels, a collection of poems, and above all a large number of translations from English. 1 Belmont's work as translator over more than four decades ranges from Henry James (The Ambassadors), Malcolm Lowry (Hear us, O Lord, from Heaven, Thy Dwelling-Place), Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited), and James Hardley Chase, to autobiographies of political and artistic figures such as Golda Meier and Arthur Rubinstein. Four authors with whom Belmont's name is more closely associated are Graham Greene (four titles: A Sort of Life, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor), Peter Townsend (five titles), Erica Jong (Fear of Flying and eight other titles), and Anthony Burgess (13 titles, including A Clockwork Orange). But there is one author who is inseparable from Belmont in his role as translator: Henry Miller. In addition to the 13 titles Belmont translated (including Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Max and the White Phagocytes, The Smile at the Foot of [End Page 221] the Ladder), he has published prefaces to Miller translations by others and a volume of interviews he conducted with Miller in 1970 for the French national radio and television, known as the "Entretiens de Paris," and has contributed an introduction and thirty-eight dense pages of personal notes to the French translation of Mary Dearborn's 1991 biography of Miller. 2 These notes document a friendship which went back to the late 1930s and they represent, together with the Entretiens, a valuable biographical source for Miller scholarship. If, however, one had to select one single book linked with Belmont's name, it would have to be not a translation but Monsieur Proust, the memoir of Céleste Albaret, Proust's housekeeper for the last nine years of his life, recorded and prefaced by Belmont. This famous literary "scoop" (seventy hours of conversations over five months according to the introduction) caused a sensation at its publication in 1973 and its prodigious success can be measured by the simple fact that, twenty-five years later, it remains in print. 3 The critical reception of the book was mostly enthusiastic but the praise was not altogether unqualified. In spite of the ghostwriter's protestations of absolute objectivity in his introduction, doubts were raised about certain aspects of Céleste's monologue, which veers from a self-effacing to a vehemently assertive tone, denouncing what she views as the "lies" (mensonges is used frequently) that have been spread about her master, suggesting for instance that if Proust had been homosexual she would have been aware of it, and, while she repeatedly denies having any literary competence, often sounds as if she were paraphasing or parodying well-known passages from the Recherche. 4 Is Belmont's Céleste quite the same person as the one interviewed for French television by Roger Stéphane?