In 1885, nearly broke from bad investments and dying of cancer, Ulysses S. Grant spent his final days writing the bestselling memoir that gave his family financial security after he was gone. The story of Grant’s swan song seems memorably American, touched by the mythic national themes of boom and bust, ruin and redemption, the abiding art of the deal.
But a generation before Grant’s grand authorial gesture, French aristocrat François-René de Chateaubriand did something similar with Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, published shortly after his death in 1848. By 1836, Chateaubriand was deep in debt when he executed what was essentially a literary mortgage, selling the posthumous publication rights for his memoirs to a group of investors in exchange for a handsome advance and generous annuity for him and, should she survive him, his wife. He had wanted to delay publication of the book until 50 years after his death, but the terms ultimately embargoed the project only as long as he was alive.
Chateaubriand, who had been working on his memoirs intermittently since around 1803, had quite a life story to tell, which is apparently why his publisher was willing to fund the writer’s retirement to get the manuscript. Soldier, witness to the French Revolution, diplomat, North American explorer, novelist, Christian apologist, and poet, Chateaubriand was the Zelig of his day, appearing to be everywhere at once. “Thus did Chateaubriand straddle not only two centuries but also two worlds, that of the ancien régime and that of the modern era,” writes scholar Anka Muhlstein.
Alex Andriesse’s new rendering of the early chapters of the memoirs into English is the first major take on the material in decades. It nicely complements Robert Baldick’s 1961 translation, which has been the go-to version of Chateaubriand until now. Baldick’s selected Memoirs, still in print in a Penguin edition, picks and chooses some of the best material from Chateaubriand’s entire work, which covers the years from the author’s birth through 1841. Andriesse translates only the first part, which concludes at the dawn of the 19th century, but he includes Part One in its entirety. There are four parts in all, the complete work running to more than 2,500 pages in the Pléiade edition of 1947, Andriesse’s primary source material.
In her introduction to the new Memoirs, Muhlstein offers a capsule summary of Chateaubriand’s life—no small feat given its varied and complicated turns. Born in 1768 in Brittany, Chateaubriand grew up in an old castle, which suited his father, an enthusiast of feudal culture. He enlisted in the Royal Army at 18 and witnessed the revolution of 1789, eventually seeking refuge in America to avoid the postwar bloodbath. Chateaubriand’s ostensible reason for visiting America was to discover the Northwest Passage, an audacious idea given his complete lack of experience. His primary claim to fame at that point had been getting a poem published.
Chateaubriand did not, alas, make a navigational breakthrough in the New World, although the change of scenery gave him lots of literary material. Atala and René, two novellas inspired by his observations of Native American culture, became period hits, along with The Genius of Christianity, a defense of the faith against the attacks of the French Enlightenment. By 1800, Chateaubriand was back in France, his fortunes rising or falling with the fickle political climate. He was loyal to the Bourbon throne but a political liberal on many levels, sometimes ostracized for his fervent defense of a free press. “He had a vision of social transformation that did not entail the obliteration of the past, and was proud to declare himself ‘Bourboniste by honor, royalist by reason and republican by inclination,’ ” Muhlstein notes.
“I wrote in verse for a long time before I wrote in prose,” Chateaubriand mentions in a chapter on his early creative life. That poetic sensibility is evident in his memoirs, which have a lyrical air much in keeping with his reputation as a founding father of French Romanticism. While Baldick seemed especially keen to the rhythms of Chateaubriand’s frequently orotund style, Andriesse’s translation is, on the whole, a bit more direct and intimate.
Andriesse’s editorial strategy—providing a big chunk of Chateaubriand unabridged rather than producing representative selections from the whole—is probably one the author would have liked. Chateaubriand was fussy about the arrangement of his work, and the memoirs have a sense of design even when they seem random and digressive.
There are times when one wonders if perhaps a little snipping might have been in order. Chateaubriand’s opening disquisition on his lineage initially looks like something to skip over, recalling those tedious genealogical stretches of the Old Testament in which one generation begets another.
But then Chateaubriand subtly reveals the point of his prolixity. As his brother is citing this noble pedigree so Chateaubriand can be admitted into the coveted Order of Malta, he’s approved for membership just as the revolution of 1789 intensifies, with disastrous consequences for the family. Chateaubriand’s pacing is artfully eerie—the long recitation of ancestral bonds suggesting an inevitable extension of power and privilege far into the future, then that seeming certainty suddenly shattered by violence and atrocity. It’s chilling, in much the same way that Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory demonstrated the fragility of what was assumed to be the natural order in pre-1917 Russia.
Humanity’s vulnerability to change is an underlying theme of Chateaubriand. “The hours never suspend their flight; it is not man who stops time,” he muses, “but time that stops man.”
Like many French writers—Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld—Chateaubriand could be brightly epi-gram-matic, and there are verbal gems throughout, such as this one: “Aristocracy has three successive ages: the age of superiority, the age of privilege, and the age of vanity. Once through with the first, it degenerates into the second, and dies out in the last.” He offers this bit of advice for tolerating political differences—even the ones that had led his countrymen to kill each other: “One has to take men as they are and not always see them as they are not and as they cannot be anymore.”
Readers should dog-ear choice passages if they want to find them again. This NYRB edition has no index, a curious omission for an important work of scholarship. And it would also have benefited from a small chronology outlining key points in Chateaubriand’s life. He did so many things—and lived so many lives—that one sometimes wishes for a few more editorial signposts to follow the narrative. Andriesse’s footnotes—tucked unhelpfully in the back, like the fine print at the bottom of a contract—are nonetheless worth consulting, especially when they sort out conflicting evidence on the veracity of some of Chateaubriand’s claims. An enduring controversy involves the memoirist’s account of meeting George Washington in Philadelphia—an impossibility, say some critics, since the president was sick in bed at the time Chateaubriand supposedly shared dinner with him. Biographer George D. Painter takes a more charitable view, arguing that the two did meet, though on a different date. There are also serious questions about whether Chateaubriand visited as many places in America as he claimed; the limitations of period travel make the speed of his itinerary seem farfetched. Andriesse cites possible cultural distinctions on historical accuracy, observing “that while the French are satisfied by a well-told tale, we Anglophones can’t help but fact-check.” Maybe he’s onto something. Naturalist John James Audubon, a contemporary of Chateaubriand who was raised in France and later became a U.S. citizen, also told a few whoppers in his American travelogue, including a tale about hunting with Daniel Boone, an adventure called into question by substantial evidence to the contrary.
Though Chateaubriand might be factually flexible, his Memoirs have a way of gravitating toward larger truths. His concerns about the challenges of national unity in the United States seem prescient in light of the current fashion in identity politics: “What connection is there between a Frenchman from Louisiana, a Spaniard from the Floridas, a German from New York, and an Englishman from New England, Virginia, the Carolinas, or Georgia[?] . . . How many centuries will it take to render these elements homogeneous!”
These Memoirs, still speaking to new audiences 170 years after his death, would probably surprise even Chateaubriand with their durability. They’re a testament to his belief that in a world in flux, literature is a promising constant. “Achilles exists only through Homer,” he once told his readers. “Take away the art of writing from this world, and you will probably take away its glory.”
Danny Heitman, a columnist for the Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
