Shorter Notices
The Universal Singular. By Pierre Em- manuel. Translated from the French by Erik de Maily. (Grey Walls Press. 13s. 6d.) A POET and intellectual of a deeply religious cast, M. Pierre Emmanuel describes in this
--- rapt, gravely meditative, youthfully anxious and not always comprehensible essay in autobiography the stages through which he has passed on the way to his present philo- sophy of life and art. It is a curious book, candidly self-conscious in temper and at times unexpectedly touching, which projects many of the dilemmas of thought of his serious-minded French generation and a familiar search for an " integrated " per- sonality within the discipline of Christian doctrine. M.. Emmanuel's is an individual and all but uncanonical Roman Catholic
prescription for 'eness in life and art. Its more mystica' ,;verations—which have clearly presentee the translator with un- common difficulty—partake, as might be expected, of a private and obscure language. As with others who at an early age have begun to live at a high, intellectual level, his memories of childhood are not particularly sharp or vivid ; he has the feeling of having " missed " a real childhood, and yet he inevit- ably turns back to the years of childhood for a key to truth, reality, his own poetic nature, and so on. Separated from his parents and left in the- charge of an unthink- ing and unimaginative uncle, timid and bookish from the start, the boy had the mis- fortune to be sent to a religious school in Lyons of the dreariest, narrowest and most forbidding kind. Small wonder in the cir- cumstances that M. Emmanuel's mind and senses should have been fired by Les Nour- ritures Terrestres, or that the true impulse of poetry should awaken in him only after the heady and insidious intoxication that G.ide
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