favorite book,favorite author,an article.(2)

“Climates” is about reading, writing, and talking, and also about silence. It is a novel in which a wife can not find the words to tell her husband where she has been all day, a husband can think of nothing interesting to say to his wife, and everybody fails to say out loud what he or she can write in notebooks and letters. All this silence points backward, to Philippe’s childhood. His father and mother never talked about anything, he complains, and certainly never about emotion.

Maurois’s own family was similar. In his memoirs, he calls his father “bashful” and his mother “reserved.” Between them, they filled the house with “melancholy reticences and unexpressed doubts.” Some of the silence surrounded a particular subject: the family’s Jewishness. This was not exactly hidden, but it was not brought to the fore, either. Maurois, who was born Émile Herzog on July 26, 1885, found out that he was Jewish at the age of about six, when a friend at the local Protestant church told him so. His parents confirmed it, but they also spoke highly of Protestantism. When he became famous, after the First World War, Maurois changed his name, probably more because it sounded German than because it sounded Jewish. He chose “André”, from a cousin killed in combat, and “Maurois” from a village near Cambrai, because he liked the name’s “sad sonority.” It was a veiled name, and a melancholy one, but it accompanied him through a generally very cheerful literary career.

The Herzog family had fled their native Alsace during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, and settled in the town of Elbeuf, in Normandy, where they ran a successful textile mill. The bourgeois and provincial atmosphere of Elbeuf sometimes horrified Maurois, but he felt at home there, and liked to return to breathe in “the moist, vapid odor of steam and the heavy odor of greasy wool,” and to admire the bright colors of the river, which ran blue, green, and yellow from the mill’s dye works. The whole town reverberated to the clang of the looms pounding like a heartbeats.

He had a good education at the lycée in Rouen, falling under the influence of a charismatic teacher, Émile-Auguste Chartier, known as “Alain.” Alain inspired other pupils, too, including Simone Weil and Raymond Aron, urging them to question received ideas. He gave Maurois a love of literature but also, perhaps surprisingly, urged him to take up the mill business after leaving school. Maurois did so, but in his Elbeuf office he kept a secret cupboard filled with Balzac novels and notebooks, and copied out pages of Stendhal to improve his writing style. He became a Kipling enthusiast, and learned excellent English.

He travelled to Paris at least one day a week, and frequented brothels there. One can almost see him starting to turn into one of those coarse provincial industrialists who keeps a mistress in the city and a stifling respectable household at home. But he was diverted from this path by falling madly in love.