GLR November-December 2023

states: “As far as I am concerned, I think I can state that my erotic obsessions were, at the time, directed exclusively towards women.” Whether du Gard himself was gay is still an open question, but, given his close friendship with Gide, one can deduce that he had no objection to being gay. Intrigu ingly, as embodied in the character of Mau mort, we get the sense of an author trying to answer the question of how, when one has sex with other men, one does not turnout to be homosexual. To wit, what is one to make of the following passage? [A]t that time—the time when I was be ginning my studies at the Sorbonne—I had no notion of the role that homosexu ality plays in society. The games of two boys seemed to me a stop-gap due to the absence of the female sex. ... I did not imagine that those games could continue among adults, or that a grown man ... would, out of personal taste, go looking for other men. ... And, in any case—of this I am certain—I had no idea what ho mosexual love was. I mean I was not aware that relations between men could be anything other than a joint exercise in onanism. This gives rise to the question: if, later in life, du Gard as Maumort has somehow

come to understand what homosexual love is, how has he arrived at this under standing? As the translators remark in their introduction: “To what extent does Mau mort’s memoir constitute a disguised con fession by Martin du Gard? We can only speculate.” But I have yet to address the most re markable gay-positive aspect of the book, a chapter called “The Drowning” that pur ports to be an entry in the diary of Mau mort’s childhood tutor Xavier. It tells the thinly veiled story of a young military re cruit posted in rural France who becomes enamored of a local youth. Through a series of secret meetings, they realize their mutual attraction. There is an eventual confirmation of this on both sides, which leads to tragic consequences. So nuanced and sensitive is the description of this attraction, so painstakingly detailed are the perils of the romance, that one is again left wondering why a straight man would feel compelled to create a fifty-page gay love story, and how he could do it so successfully without a huge amount of sympathy or fellow-feeling himself. Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is beau tifully written and psychologically astute, and it contains an almost romantic depiction of a vanished world. Indeed, in an earlier

conception of the work, Maumort locks himself in the bedroom of his chateau as the Nazis invade, intent upon chronicling the era rapidly vanishing all around him. Though the comparisons to Tolstoy seem to me a stretch, the parallels to Proust are en tirely appropriate. Indeed, the depictions of the salons of his parents, in which charac ters such as Pasteur and Turgenev wander through, are very reminiscent of Madame Verdurin’s soirées in In Search of Lost Time . Alas, the novel–memoir breaks down after 500 or so pages and is ultimately in complete. There are also some painfully racist scenes (again, one isn’t sure whether to blame Maumort or du Gard). Du Gard’s indecision on the book’s genre takes a toll. It does not seem to me that his later attempt to recast the work as a diary, or as an episto lary novel (which is also included in the volume), succeeds any better than the early novelized memoir. Nevertheless, as imper fect and incomplete as it is (like life it self), Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort still delights and astonishes, and it deserves to be much better known. Dale Boyer, a frequent reviewer in these pages, is the author of Columbus in the New World: Selected Poems .

November–December 2023

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