408
PARTISAN REVIEW
he mulls over the failure of works he had felt sure of
(Soft Skin, Fahrenheit
451 , Two English Girls)
and, drawing a conclusion, feels some of the sting
fade away. This to-and-fro development leads his thought in so many differ–
ent directions that the slow genesis which the letters offer is not that of
An–
toine Doinel at all, but only of the need for Doinel in Truffaut's completed life.
Beyond that surprise, at least one remarkable continuity is displayed:
Truffaut's epistolary voice. It is not Leaud's clipped enthusiasm, nor is it the
voice heard in
Two English Girls
(where Truffaut narrates in a winged but
discreetly regretful way, like a messenger with bad news), nor the one he
refuses to portray (the "voice of the father" in a film starring Leaud) at the
request of a fellow director. Once his career is underway, it is a voice full of
personability but at the same time impersonal, singularly warm but circum–
spect as well. "Don't count on me to preface [the] book with modesty,
discretion or measure. Andre Bazin and Jean Renoir have been too impor–
tant in my life for me to be able to speak of them without passion.
J ean
Renoir
by Andre Bazin is naturally the
best
book of cinema, written by the
best
critic on the
best
director": that is the opening of his preface. On the same
subject in the letters, he does not profess passion and nature at all. The key
line is: " ... after all, I'm not the only one who thinks Renoir is the world's
greatest director" - which reads like a disclaimer of himself.
To know anything about Truffaut's nervous collapses, or his opinion on
the events of May 1968, or his feelings paternal and otherwise for
DoineVLeaud, the reader will do better to consult his public writings which
offer, in all, a franker presentation of the man. The letters but rarely go into
personal affairs, and then most often because Truffaut has been contacted by
ajournalist who wants to know ifhe eats at La Coupole, what he plans to
give for Christmas, and so on. People in show business, he observes in one
letter, "must know how to let [themselves] be forgotten from time
to
time"
by the public. But the correspondence suggests that he could not keep his part
of the bargain. His private letters are noteworthy for their public tone, with
an urbanity and composure closer to high epistolary tradition than to his indi–
vidual talent. Apart from some of the letters to his American friend and col–
laborator Helen Scott, and one memorable exception ("I have a toothache
which is killing me and have got
to
go to the dentist at once.
Butfirst
I'll
write ... ") from his youth, there is no self-dramatization and little play with
circumstances. Conversely, many of these letters must have been dictated
and typed as business letters, but so thoroughly are they informed by a spirit
of generosity and sympathy that, even when professional interests are at
stake, one cannot escape the feeling that each letter has been written by a
friend.
This aspect is conveyed, above all, in the tone. "In" words or allusions
