ll7
CEZANNE: THE LIFE AND THE WORK
PAUL CEZANNE. By
John Rewo ld. Simon ond Schuster.
$5.00.
This could be described as an "efficient" biography of Cezan–
ne, and in doing so one would wish to suggest all the unimpassioned and
colorless industry usually associated with the word. Whether the book
also merits in any significant sense the additional word "useful" is a
debatable question, but that it will have its uses may be conceded at
once.
It
is, one would say, a handy book to have around to verify a date
or offer excerpts from original documents. Mr. Rewald is quite insistent
on his book's ability to perform this latter function. He says in the
introduction:
It presents another attempt to let facts speak for themselves, to rely
chiefly on documents and witness accounts, to quote from the originals
whenever possible, and thus bring the reader into direct contact with
the historic evidence. It again assigns to the author mainly the role
o~
coordinating this evidence and presenting it in the most effective and
also the most scrupulously exact way.
With most of this statement most readers would be in agreement;
nevetherless, some of the book's chief faults are explained by several
assumptions that are implicit in this announcement of intentions. Behind
the commendable concern for accuracy and esteem for evidence, there
is a strong "scientific" bias, a prejudice for "facts" as unmistakable as
Thomas Gradgrind's. Although Mr. Rewald's volume is based on work
he did at the Sorbonne, in this respect it is representative of a good deal
of recent American scholarship and criticism. The assumption that "facts
speak for themselves" is
only
an assumption where biography and
criticism are concerned, and one cannot help noticing in the present
case that precisely those little facts which are least important-which
may, indeed, be quite misleading for the complete picture-are the ones
that prove, among the documents and letters, to have the most raucous
voices. To achieve the right proportions and relationships something
more than a coordinating agent is required. Mr. Rewald's book leaves
one with the impression that Cezanne was "unhygienic" (the word
literally stares one down), much given to cursing and vulgar language,
and had exceptionally boorish manners. These things are undoubtedly
true in some degree, but they are not the truth that one wishes to be
left with in the case of Cezanne. It is Mr. Rewald's failure to grasp-<>r
more probably his determination not to grasp--Cezanne as a rounded
personality that permits this distortion of emphasis. A true biography
is not only the result of critically sifted and properly coordinated evi-
