Arts and Letters

I met Francis Steegmuller when The New Yorker bought a story of his and gave it to me to edit. Since it needed editing the way a cat needs two tails, my connection with him remained slight. To explain what changed this I have to go all the way around Robin Hood's barn. When Francis graduated from Columbia he went straight to Paris. There, in the studio of the cubist painter Jacques Villon, he met Beatrice Stein, an American girl who was Villon's pupil. She had red hair and the warm heart that often accompanies it. She got polio when she was an adolescent and it left her with an atrophied leg, unable to walk without crutches. When she came of age her mother said to her, "You can stay home and I will take care of you, or you can go abroad on your own and have a life."

She and Francis continued to see each other when they returned to New York and he got a job at The New Yorker, writing for "The Talk of the Town." But then she went off to Vienna to study painting. Knowing that she had other suitors, Francis asked for a leave of absence but didn't explain why he wanted it. Harold Ross thought it was because he didn't care very much about the magazine and fired him. This was, of course, a stroke of good fortune, because Francis's talents lay elsewhere. He and Beatrice Stein were married in Vienna.

One evening in the mid-forties, as Francis started off to a literary cocktail party, she said to him, "I've made a beef stew. If you meet anybody there that you like talking to, bring them home to supper." Home, at that point, was a suite of small rooms in the Hotel Ansonia at Broadway and Seventy-third Street. After the introductions, Francis took my wife's coat and mine, and produced a bottle of champagne. The stew was delicious. And the four-way friendship that instantly sprang into being turned out to be life long.

It was impossible to know Francis and not love him. Large people tend to be good-natured and Francis was, very. I never heard him raise his voice in anger. On the other hand disapproval was formidable, and he did not lightly put it aside. When I wrote a novel about Americans traveling in France his careful and detailed criticism was of great help to me. He was, almost from infancy, a Francophile. His mother said that before he was nine he had all but worn out the section on France in the family encyclopedia.

The French values of clarity and style and order inform everything he ever published. There was no clutter on his desk or in his study or in his mind. He typed the final manuscript of his books himself, using black typewriter ribbon for the text and red for the footnotes. Those pages I saw were elegantly typed and had no hand-written corrections.

Bea died of cancer, in 1961. Francis's grief and despair were so great that I was afraid he would never emerge from them, but after a while Fortune took pity on him. At another literary cocktail party, the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark said to him, "Francis, come with me—I want you to meet Shirley Hazzard."

A new life opened for him in his late fifties, and lightened both their spirits. He and Shirley Hazzard were married standing in front of the fireplace of a house Francis had taken in Sharon, Connecticut, with a few friends to witness the ceremony. Though they were different temperamentally, they were often like one person—for example, in the disciplined way in which they wanted to live. They divided the year between an apartment in Manhattan House and an eighteenth-century villa on the outskirts of Naples, with a view across the water of Mt. Vesuvius. There was also a pied-à-terre on the nearby island of Capri. They led a very productive writing life; during these years he won the National Book Award for his Cocteau and she won the Book Critics Circle and the American Book Awards for The Transit of Venus. And they were very happy. Their shared pleasure in reading, in art, in travel, in the company of friends, resulted in a closeness he thought the most important thing in his life.

The sweetness of Francis's nature is attested to by the fact that he remained on intimate terms with three highly irascible men—the novelist Graham Greene, the British art collector and critic, Douglas Cooper, and the most difficult of all, a Frenchman, the son of a provincial doctor, born in Rouen, in 1821, who died in 1880, twenty-seven years before Francis was born.

Francis once remarked, "Only one person stands between me and the authorship of Madame Bovary." I saw that he was only partly joking. That person, now residing on Mt. Parnassus, has reason to be grateful to him. What happens in Francis's translation of that novel is what happens when a century or more of repeated varnishings are removed from a painting and the original bright colors are once more revealed.

To appreciate the quality of his translation of Flaubert's letters, all that is necessary is to read the same letter translated by someone else. All in all, as biographer, translator, editor, annotator, and critic he served the master on eight occasions, over a period of fifty-four years. Long before this immense body of work was accomplished Francis was wearing, in the buttonhole of his lapel, the thin red ribbon of the Legion d'Honneur.

Just when one had come to think of him, because of his biographies or partial biographies of James Jackson Jarvis, Guy de Maupassant, and Flaubert as most at home in the nineteenth century, by his life of the Grand Mademoiselle, he established himself with equal authority in the seventeenth; with Mme. d'Épinay and the Abbé Galiani in late-eighteenth-century Paris and the Kingdom of Naples; with Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau in the twentieth. Cocteau was considered to be of slight importance until Francis dealt with the quality and range of his accomplishments. The book has been mined ever since for interesting figures of the period.

The biographer deals with people frozen in time; unless he is lazy or a fool, they cannot escape him or succeed in covering their tracks. It is, needless to say, not merely a question of digging up the facts. There has to be a moral tone one can trust. In Francis's books there is no trace of the vindictive attitude toward the chosen subject that afflicts so many current biographies and that will speedily consign them to oblivion.