A SENSE OF DIGNITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 988, 25 July 1958, Page 14

A SENSE OF DIGNITY

A TIME TO KEEP, by André Chamson, transldted by Erik de Mauny; Faber & Faber, English price 30/-. NDRE CHAMSON is a distinguished member of that generation of French writers whose lives and works are woven

vividly into the fabric of West European society from the turn of the century to the present day. As the pattern emerges it reveals in turn the breakup of the Old’Order, the establishment and breakdown of the New and, today, the search for a solid basis on which we can build once again. Although less committed than Aragon’s or Malraux’s or Sartre’s, Chamson’s essays and novels are similarly preoccupied with the individual’s struggle to maintain a sense of dignity, purpose and fulfilment in a world of mass pressures and _ vast confusion. In A Time to Keep, the author affectionately recalls his provincial middle class childhood in the mountains of Cevennes. How proud they all werethe swarms of relatives, the Adelberts, Armands, Sophies and Emiles-of France’s manifest destiny, not only as a leader in the arts and sciences, but as an invincible military power. How they cherished their Protestantism and independence, how they loved poetry and

painting and how concerned they. were with the meaning of life: "A wonderful evening," she was saying, waving her handkerchief like a fan. "Nothing can be lost as long as we still have poets!’’ "War itself is nothing in the face of poetry," replied the professor, pursing his lips into a small "o’’ with admiration. And then the War came and the golden promise of Chamson’s youth turned out to have been the sunset of a dying era. The luminous quality of this oddly poignant book has been sensitively retained in translation by Erik de Mauny, a transplanted New Zealander now living

in London.

Henry

Walter