Robert Julian
TRUFFAUT'S NOTES
Readers of autobiography are familiar with the scene when the
author decides late in the narrative to set about writing the book in hand .
Joyce and Proust made use of the form but did not invent it, and for St.
Augustine, too, it may have been a canonic working of fate. Fran<;ois
Truffaut, whose voluminous
Correspondance
(Cinq Continents) was published
in 1988 in France (and it has recently appeared in English here*),set out
early on the autobiographical road with his first and most famous movie,
Four Hundred Blows
(1958). There, too, the ups and downs ofa Parisian
childhood spawn the literary-cinematic event: the birth ofa film-maker.
Truffaut's
Correspondance
begins in the thick of that romance, at age
thirteen, and ends a few months before his death in 1984 at age fifty-two,
but much of the interest of the 660-page volume lies in its dissident portrait
of a man whose work is largely - and rightly - known as autobiographical. In
a handful of incidents, Truffaut is unmistakably himself, or the character he
represented most unforgettably as himself (Antoine Doinel, Jean-Pierre
Leaud), as when he sells off his best friend's library to bail himself out of
teenage debt; or volunteers for Indochina only to turn objector within the
army a few months later; or urges the same friend at the age of twenty-six
to mine their childhood letters for material for
Four Hundred Blows
("Note
down your ideas and memories for Antoine's running away from home. Dig
out our letters ... "). But as Truffaut's career gets underway, moving be–
yond what might be called his precocious culmination, other elements come to
the surface, and one can only be struck by the heterogeneity of the facets
which make up the apparently familiar face.
Events take second place. Even when writing to friends far away,
there is little of the intellectual scene (some talk of Sartre but nothing of exis–
tentialism as such, structuralism, Lacan or Foucault) or even of political
events like the 1968 student uprising or Vietnam. The film world receives
far greater attention but more on a steady, day-to-day basis than in terms of
dramatic occurrences. Rather, the letters set out thoughts which often take
years to ripen: ideas unfold into films, slowly gaining on him by a process he
described as "progressive encroachment," and films unwind back into ideas as
*Fran(ois Truffaut. Correspondence,
1945-1984. Edited by Gilles
Jacob
and Claude
de Givray. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $50.00.
