Girard de Nerval. By S. A. Rhodes. (Peter Owen :
The Vision Press. 25s.) IN the publisher's opinion the life of this minor French poet has a higher interest than that of some other nineteenth-century writers whom he lists, since most of their work was done before they lost their reason, whereas the best of his seems " to have been contingent upon his temporary loss of it." But is doubtful whether, despite this strange claim—so symptomatic of certain contem- porary fashions—Nerval is really a very adequate subject for a biography. He wrote half-a-dozen sonnets of powerful and con- fused symbolism, and a great deal of prose which hugged the dim frontier between dream and reality, between memory and fiction. Mr. Rhodes is at great pains to sort the young ladies who glide in and out of his stories according to their v4rying degrees of authenticity ; it seems to hun important to decide quite how many of de Nerval's Hoffmannesque fantasies the reader should accept ; and therefore he is at some pains to paraphrase and condense whole passages from Aurelia and the Voyage en Orient, for which he uses a particularly poor transla- tion. His comments on the poetry are on a rather higher level. But, unless one is especially attracted to existences on the odder fringes of Bohemia, one can rest content with such a short account of the , poet as that given by Norman Cohn in an issue of Horizon of 1944. Mr. Cohn makes all the points so repetitively laboured by Mr. Rhodes in the modest space of twenty pages—a twentieth of those covered by this exhaustive and monotonous work. J. M. C.
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